Where should I go [online] to find out information about RAIDs and Controller cards? I'm thinking of when I get all the parts together, I'll do a Striped RAID 0 with my SATA 250 gig and a new 320 gig SATA I'm buying for my birthday and will install down the road [birthday is Jan 14th]. Does the Asus AV8 mobo support RAID? If not, who makes the best controllers? Sorry if I'm using the wrong technical terms, btw.
Try the sticky in the tech discussion main page if not gooooooooooogle it :google:
I do not know w whole lot about RAID, but i do know this, you should get another 250 gig drive, not the 320 one, other wise, the extra 70 gigs on your new drive will go to waste
Captain AmerikaWhere should I go [online] to find out information about RAIDs and Controller cards? I'm thinking of when I get all the parts together, I'll do a Striped RAID 0 with my SATA 250 gig and a new 320 gig SATA I'm buying for my birthday and will install down the road [birthday is Jan 14th]. Does the Asus AV8 mobo support RAID? If not, who makes the best controllers? Sorry if I'm using the wrong technical terms, btw.
Yes your Mobo supports RAID but honestly it is stupid to use it. For one you need identical drives and you really won't notice a difference in performance over 1 drive. If you must have raid then RAID 1 (Data mirroring) will protect your data from harddrive failures.
Promise Technologies and Adaptec make good aftermarket raid controllers. But as Hmmmdonut stated, the performance difference compared to a good single drive is minimal in day-to-day use, including gaming. Only if you move large files on a regular basis (photoshop or video encoding) or are making thousands or read/writes per second (running a server) will a raid setup be beneficial. On the other hand, if you have the controller built into your motherboard anyways, it's fun to set up and play around with. If you use two drives of differing sizes like you're planning, set it up as a jbod (just a bunch of disks) drive. Your computer will see the two drives as one massive one.
When in doubt, gas it!