Confused about Harddrives

Whats all this RAID-0, SATA, and IDE stuff mean :| Sorry, dumb question.

 

IDE, which means basically the same thing as ATA, is the most basic of the three and uses a 50-pin ribbon cable to connect HD's and CD-ROM drives to the IDE channels on the motherboard.

SATA is serial ATA. Like IDE but faster and uses a much smaller cable and connection. The motherboard has to be set-up for SATA, or a PCI card must be used. More expensive the IDE.

RAID configurations are used for speed or redundancy and realiability. RAID setups are more expensive and also require an adapter.

Not a dumb question at all.



Steve

 

Oh, alright I get it now Thanks a lot for the help.

 

So, S-ATA is better than IDE ? Is it hard to set up the motherboard for S-ATA ?

 

Yes, SATA is better then IDE. You can get a PCI SATA adapter for less than $50 bucks.



Steve

 

the standard hard drives that most are familiar with are ATAPI 'EIDE' or 'IDE' hard drives, which you will now may hear referred to as "Parallel ATA". these connect through the standard grey ribbon cables, or now the new rounded cables which supposedly increase ariflow, while looking a whole lot cooler

here's a small history lesson that is gibberish, but can put perspective on things:

At these hard drives first debut, they ran through an ISA interface, and only supported 4Mb/s tranfer rates. Things progressed to 8, and then more efficent interfaces were used, called PIO and DMA. these brought the transfer rates from 8.3Mb/s up to todays standards.

The current models of these hard drives have an interface of ATA-100 or ATA-133, theoretically allowing 100Mb/s and 133Mb/s respectively.

The NEW hard drives to hit the scene are SATA or "Serial ATA" hard drives, which connect through a much smaller serial cable, and eventually will nto require a power cable, as they can draw sufficent power from the motherboard. These have a transfer rate of ATA-150, theoretically 150Mb/s.

When someone refers to RAID, they are talking about using 2 or more hard drives in an Array, which can have many different fetures than 1 hard drive working alone. Servers use Mirrored RAID arrays, the most simple of which is RAID-1, which basically makes a mirror image of the primary drive onto a backup, to prevent data loss in case 1 drive fails.

RAID-0, or 'striping' uses both hard drives as if they were one larg hard drive, accessing both at once and writing 'across' them, theoretically doubling read and write times. RAID-0 has been found to be very easily corruptable, placing a high amount of stress on each hard drive, and drives have been known to die rather quickly in such a setup.

more info on RAID can be found here http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

hope that helps some

 

Thanks