Hard Drive Question

[madrusty289]

For all you other computer nerds out there...

I am in the market for a new hard drive, preferanbly at around $0.75 per gig and at least 80 gigs. Also, I would need a controller card, which I don't really understand. Should I get a RAID controller card? Why? Why not? RAID is one of the few hardware things I don't fully understand. My current hard drive is 20 gigs, and I would like to keep it, because it has Windows on it. So can the 80 gig and 20 gig be used together?

Thanks.

EDIT: My local computer expert told me that RAID can't be used with two drives that aren't the same, so ignore those qustions.

[ND4SPDR]

Yeah, no need for RAID. I got some 180 gig Western Digital for $200 minus $100 rebate. Nice deal. Check Fry's often. I assume you know that the ads are on the back of the sports or business page most days and there's a large ad every Friday.

[sipa]

I have 1 western digital 120 gig as my slave hd, and whatever came in my AW as master...

Ya I'm pretty sure you can't use raid with 2 HDs though. You can usually find good sale prices on HD's in my area, but there are usually about 20 rebates. :lol:



WEEEee another useless sipa post!

[Invisable Assassion]

Ok, I’m not sure if you still need this answered so I will answer it anyway

First, you do not want a RAID, it may help to understand what RAID stands for. Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks. what that means in some less technical terms is that its a whole bunch of hard drives, its usually used for people who need a ridiculous amount of storage, business and the like doing data back up, and other applications where you need to store a large amount of data relatively cheaply. what you may or may not have understood is that a RAID is not placed inside your computer case, it is not like a normal hard drive in that, a RAID controller as you put it would go into one of your PCI slots, and then you would have another box that this controller would attach too, this box would basically consist of more than 4 hard drives, and a small controller on the inside of that case. all this means is that the average consumer does not need or even want a RAID. it is only for the big guys really.


Second, what I think you may have meant, a ATA controller, ATA, and ultra ATA are the most commonplace methods of communicating data between the motherboard and the hard drive, cd, ect. Put in English, this means that ATA, and Ultra ATA are the current standards for communication with the majority of hard drives on the market today. Unfortunately if you have a slightly older comp, your computer may have a different way of communicating, depending on the age and standard at the time, you may not need an ATA controller, but it is advised that you buy one anyway as it will speed up the speed with which the computer can communicate (eg, write and read) to the drive. Because I have a dense mother and I am testing this explanation on her, and she is not currently understanding, I will put it another way, this is only a very general allegory but should get the general point across. you could think of all the ways of communication between your mother board and you hard drives, cd drives, ect as spoken languages, the motherboard and the drives speak a certain language, unfortunately while most drives and such can speak many languages, the mother board, especially old ones don’t, they speak a very limited number, in recent years however, some smart people have invented a new language that lets peripherals communicate very fast with the motherboard, all the little new motherboards learn this in school, but the old motherboard, try as it might, doesn’t learn. But there is hope, if the old motherboard buys a translation dictionary (in this case the ATA controller) it will be able to communicate just as fast as all the little motherboards who have grown up speaking the language.
So what does that mean, basically, if you need a controller, and you trust your computer dealer that he has told you the truth, then you need to buy the controller, it will let you communicate very fast between the motherboard and the hard drive, you will be able to plug both hard drives into the one controller, so you will still be able to use you 20 gig one in addition to the new one. The instructions included with your purchase would cover any problems with the installation that you may have. Personally I recommend Western Didgital drives, many of the larger ones come with a ATA controller. You may wonder what the number after the ata means, usually is something like ATA/100, or ATA/133. in actual fact, for the non avid computer nut, most will not notice a difference, so completely forget about it.

If you still have questions, or I was not clear enough and you would like a simpler explanation, please just contact me.

[Bigwrenn]

Don't forget about bios updates to handle a larger hard disk!:D

[22benjamin22]

I agree with most of what I.A. said. Simply put: most people can't tell the difference between a 5 year old 3.2gig drive and a new 200gig drive. The time they notice is when they run out of space.

If you're replacing your primary drive and will be loading the Operating System on it, look for the Western Digital 8mb Cache models. They come in 80, 120, 160 and 200gig flavors. When it comes to the primary System drive (where the OS - Windows - is loaded) I can actually time the difference. The 8mb cache seems to speed up load times significantly.

[madrusty289]

I.A, thanks alot. I already new all that, but I'm sure that helpful explanation helped others. I will be getting a Western Digital 80gb Special Edition with 8mb. I had already decided on that one before my first post here. I already knew I need an ATA card, I just wanted to know what kind.

EDIT: A few more things about RAID:
1) You don't need to put it in a different box.
2)RAID has a few different types- RAID0(striped), RAID1(mirrored), and RAID5 (striped + mirror)
3) Striped is where half the data goes on 1 hd and the other half on the other. This means, it'll read/write faster since each HD only has to do half the work
4) Mirror is where 2 HDs are indentical. So incase 1 dies, you still have ALL your data intact and then you won't lose a single thing because it reads/writes the exact same thing to both.
5)^^^Both of those require 2 HDs
6) Raid 5 requires 4

[JeffS]

6) Raid 5 requires 4 [/B]

Actually, RAID 5 can be done with 3 drives, and technically, it's not striped + mirrored, that'd be RAID 0 + 1. :)


RAID 0 Disk Striping
RAID 1 Disk Mirroring
RAID 2 Disk Striping with Hamming Code for Error Protection
RAID 3 Disk Striping with Dedicated Parity Drive
RAID 4 Disk Striping with Dedicated Parity Drive; Non- synchronized Disks Required
RAID 5 Disk Striping with Distributed Parity Parallel Disk I/O (not as Fast as RAID 0)

-Jeff

[Invisable Assassion]

I know, however I was simply trying to make it very simple to understand, the technicalities do not really need to be argued, by saying it has to go in a separate box I am simply referring to the fact that most cases are not capable of holding the full array of drives, thus you usually have a small raid case apart form your main comp that is devoted to nothing but hard drives and fans.