Alright. My problem:

I've recently purchased through AMAZING holiday deals 3 200 gig hard drives and 1 250 gig hard drive. The 250 gig (Western Digital WD2500JB) and one 200 gig (MAXTOR DiamondMax) are currently installed in my computer. The 250 is my main hard drive with windows installed, and the 200 is my storage hard drive. Now I'm looking to add my other 2 200 gig (another Maxtor DiamondMax, and a Seagate Barracuda) hard drives. Also note that these hard drives are Ultra ATA (the two maxtor 200's are Ultra ATA/133, Seagate 200 and the WD 250 are Ultra ATA/100).

I went to a local computer store called digilink and they told me I couldnt add more then 2 hard drives to my computer without getting a raid CONTROLLER, which I thought was BS. I talked to a friend that has a raid setup, and he said I can run up to 3 HDD's stock, and I can't run raid without having all SATA drives. So I looked on Newegg and they have PCI IDE controllers, but they say they can run a raid setup. So now I'm wondering which card I should get? Should I (or can I?) run a raid setup? I'm looking for maximum storage, not a mirroring setup.


Heres a link to my motherboard:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813127222

It says I can run PATA: 2 x ATA100 up to 4 Devices

Would that work for my situation?



Thanks for the help and sorry for the long post!


-BrandonNow tell me again why you want to run RAID at all if maximum storage is the issue?I dont necessarily want to run raid, but it would be nice to have a bit faster setup. Would RAID 0 be possible with my setup? Maximum storage isnt like absolutely necessary, I said that because I dont want mirroring. I guess a RAID 0 striping setup would be optimal.



-BrandonRaid 0 will be faster, but not safer. If you lose one drive, you lose everything. If you choose to use RAID 0, backup, backup, backup! If your motherboard has 2 or more IDE connectors, you can use 4 HDD. You will need more than 2 in order to use 4 HDD and a CD/DVD drive, so an add in card might be necessary, but it doesn't have to be a RAID controller. Drives with the same speed should be on the same IDE cable as master/slave or cable select. Mixing the speed of the drives on the same IDE cable means that it will run at the speed of the slowest drive. Incidentally, if you use RAID, the drives in the array should be identical, or minamally, the same size. A RAID determins usuable capacity by the smallest drive in the array. Mixing sizes will waste capacity.Alright. I just ordered a raid/ide pci card. Based on your help and what I've read I think this is how I'm gonna set it up. My WD 250gig main (with windows) and my seagate 200gig will be attached to my mobo (unfortunately both running at ata 100), while my 2 maxtor 200's will be running in raid 0 through my pci card. I think this will be best. Backups arent an issue cause I have a server on my house NETWORK and the other two hard drives to store IMPORTANT files.

Also, I have a dvd rom drive, and a dvd rw drive so I can't add the other two hdd's to my mobo.


Thanks for the help!


-BrandonSounds good. But your BIOS will probably allow booting from the raid, if desired. You can also get a speed increase by placing the swap file on a different drive from the boot drive.