It sounds like you have enough fans.

I'm upgrading this week also, but, until then, to fight the heat, I have my case open, with a room fan pushed up against it. It only drops my CPU temp by 3 degrees C, so as you can see the benefits of round cables would be hard to notice.

I read how to do RAID 0 on the new boards once; I work with SCSI so I'm not 100% sure, but, I think all you do is hook up the 2 drives to the 2 SATA connectors, select RAID 0 when you format and/or set it to RAID 0 in BIOS (I think it's in BIOS actually... formatting would have nothing to do with it). Apart from that you shouldn't have to do anything. The 2 drives get read as 1 drive with one drive name ( c:/ etc...) which has the sum of the disk space.

After that you just forget about it, and enjoy the speed.

I've got 2 drives coming in the mail for RAID 0.

 

with my ic7 (875p) i put two ide drives with sata converters (my board only does raid thru sata) into a raid 0 array.

one is 80gb the other is 120b, when in raidn 0 the total disk space is double the smallest

yes you do setup raid in the bios but when yo do you format the drives so backup if you need.

when u install windows you have to press f6 when it tells you to so you can install raid drivers (should be supplied wth the board)

i love raid...but both of my drives are ata and with those raptors it should be ultra fast

(just for saying it, i installed windows in 10 min and a total format of 160gb is less than a minute)

 

I figured the fans would be sufficent but I can always change things out later to keep it cooler. So you tell it in the BIOS to RAID the drives and it should basically do the rest for me. Maybe I will push my budget a little further and get two Raptors.


Hopefully installing XP won't be that hard. From what I've heard, it's relatively painless. Maybe I will try a RAID 0?

 

if you do get dual raptors maybe 60 gigs wont be enuf...try to get a big ide storage drive....

a person on anandtech.com had dual raptors in raid and installed xp in 5 min

 

Ha ha, 60Gig's won't be enough. That still blows my mind. Dual raptor will give me total around 72G, not sure what I'll loose formatting though. I will probably add a ~200Gig 7200 8MB IDE drive down the line bu I think 70ish Gig will be enough for now. I have a 30G in this laptop and still have like 10G left. I think I am going to try the dual raptor RAID configuration, see how it runs.

Anybody know what the deal is with WD's "special edition" drives? I was reading through the specs and they seem the same as normal high end drives, just curious. Seeya.

 

Once you set it to RAID 0 in BIOS, everything else will recognize your RAID 0 set up as a single 73GB drive. Windows shouldn't know the difference with the exception of the RAID 0 driver you'll be using. (Of course your system config will say RAID 0)

The real benefit from 10k drives is that they have fast seek times, like SCSI drives of the like. This means for example, if you're in game and there a tiny piece of information that the computer didn't put on your RAM, which it needs, when it goes to the HDD, it won't take as long to pull, and place it on the RAM. The benefit of RAID 0 is different. When you initially call up data, it's seek time, but after that when you're transfering, say, a large chunk of data, then because you have 2 drives working to pull all that data, it will be.... "twice as fast" (not really but similar).

If you put it into perspective of a warehouse, having RAID 0 is like having 2 guys run around the warehouse picking an order, and having 10k is like having a guy that can run around really fast picking an order. Ideally you want 2 guys (RAID 0) that can run around really fast (10K) picking the order.

I say you should get the 2 Raptors and then later, when you need more space, get a dirt cheap large capacity drive for the ATA100 connector, for storage. Use the twin Raptors for the OS, programs and frequently accessed stuff, or you could get the deluxe version mobo which has 2 RAID 0 controllers, and get 2 dirt cheap drives later and RAID 0 them as well.

I think the 875 and 865 chipsets are supposed to support the P5. PCI Express doesn't look like something you need. Apart from those things, all other advances will be minor, like 1066 FSB. If you always wait for what's faster, then, you'll never end up buying anything. I've been playing that game for 3 years.

 

The WD 7200RPM SE drives are the ones with 8MB cache. The older ones only have 2MB. I'm getting one myself.

 

So once it's set in the BIOS, everything else will treat it as one drive? I guess that means programs don't need to configured for it either (like HyperThreading). I'm definately going to try the RAID 0 raptors, should scream. I'll probably just add a larger drive later if it ever becomes an issue.

I was reading some info on the P5 and I though it mentioned going to an entirely new socket design. I'm not worried about buying the absoltute best, I just wanted the best for my money while staying within my budget. Of course a second Raptor will take me over but oh well.

Okay, those are the 8Meg's. For some reason I though they sold a normal 8Meg HD and a Special Edition 8Meg and I didn't know the difference. Thanks again.

 

yeah, I've got a western Digital 40GB HD, and I have an identical one laying around that I want to use in RAID 0. What controller would you recommend? Promise, or Adaptec? Adaptec driver's are already integrated into XP...

 

Adaptec's great for SCSI... I dont know how their ATA RAID controller is, but they are made for entry level servers, so they can't be that bad. Adaptec I find is easy to use.

Promise is what everyone has. A lot of the integrated motherboard RAID chips are made by Promise.

You should look into what features you want like different RAID levels, how many drives, ability to add drives and integrate RAID on the fly (not hotswapping), price, etc... They're both solid cards.

The upper end Adaptec supports 4 drives and has a 64MB ECC cache as well as more RAID functions, but costs far more than the upper end Promise card which supports 4 drives.

If you're going to only have 2 drives in RAID 0 and forget about it... then just get the cheapest one out of Adaptec, Promise, Intel?, IBM?. I dunno. There are tons of benchmarks out there.

Another company is Highpoint Technologies.