I just ordered a new HD to add on to my pc. Ive never done Raid or 2 HD's at once so instead of the usual: Me spending 5 hours on a job when it should only take 30 minutes. I thought i would ask first.

The new drive is 160 gb 16mb Western which i want for my OS (Vista) and probably games since it will be a little faster. The 2nd (old) drive is a 250 gb Western with 8mb cache.

So heres the questions:

1. How will the Sata cables hook up? 1 from the new drive to the old then to the MB?

2. Which is the best Raid? (Mostly for games, movies, and music. The usual)

3. Will these show up basically like partition do? Seperate letters etc...?

Links are fine instead of somebody type a book to answer this.

Thanks.

P.S. I had more questions but of course i forgot them when i starting typing this. Ill get back with anymore i think of.

Hello donpoppito.
Sorry no one has had a chance to look at this yet, the techs have been pretty busy tonight. I see GaRHaR and some of the other raid gurus are online, ill move this back to the top where they can look at it for you.

Hey guys

In regards to RAID - you need 2 identical hard drives to make it work to any sort of level of efficiency...
I'll answer all the questions however

1) SATA hard drives require 1 cable to be plugged into the motherboard each. There is no such thing as "master" or "slave" with SATA any longer...just SATA0, SATA1, SATA2, SATA3

2) The best RAID is dependant on what you want to do...performance for home users - RAID0...redundancy for server environents - RAID5...there is also RAID1 which is backup purposes.

3) A SATA drive is no different to a IDE/PATA drive in windows...it will show up with very little help. RAID requires drivers to be installed before windows can see it.

Hope this helps.

Thanks GaRHaR, but one thing. SInce my drives are different then i wont be able to raid them? And will that affect it in a bad way i.e. performance or anything?

Hi Don,

The way RAID works...is they need to be identical drives. Otherwise you will take a massive performance and storage hit.

I personally don't believe that RAID is that useful on home computers..the performance gain is not that noticable when running RAID or not. It's more for bragging rights.