On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:36:21 -0000, "Philip Andrews"

> - I still can't see the point of using RAID 0 at all: because although
>it may increase system speed by reducing the HDD-write 'bottleneck', the
>loss of one drive in the array would mean a total loss of stored data on all
>of the drives. Surely, RAID 0 must actually serve to make a system more
>fragile, unless I've missed something?

No, you missed nothing; RAID 0 is purely a performance thing, it has
no positive value (and indeed, much negative value) in survivability.

I generally adopt RAID 0 only when it becomes the cheapest way to
attain a high capacity data workspace, as is often the case with video
editing etc. A RAID 0 of two small HDs doesn't make much sense, if
the same capacaity is cheaper as a single HD.

There may be additional speed benefits, aside from strapping two HDs
together so as to double the data capacity per cylinder (as buying a
single twice-as-large HD would likely do, too). Not sure on that, or
how applicable they are (i.e. whether something that looks brilliant
on benchmarks will necessarily translate well to real-world use)

> - The sooner the motherboard makers (Foxconn, in this case) include a
>few paragraphs of specific information (see below) to their Mainboard
>Manuals on how to connect SATA drives in a non-RAID manner, the faster
>they'll hasten the revolution on SATA usage while reducing the unnecessary
>load on their tech staff (and on Newsgroups such as this one).

Um... I've been building with native (non-RAID) S-ATA for a while now,
and I don't remember any issues. In general, you are right, in that
practical documentation of CMOS settings is rare. Invariably you get
"help" like "Spread Spectrum: Disable - this disables Spread
Spectrum"; there's no task-orientated (e.g. "how to set up with S-ATA
as first bootable HD") or background info (e.g. "what the hell is
Spread Spectrum, anyway?") help.

In particular, S-ATA vs."legacy" IDE is a bitch. We really need
proper documentation on how these interact under the various modes,
e.g. "legacy", "enhanced" and so on. If you have S-ATA HDs, an "IDE"
optical drive, and an IDE HD you don't want on the same channel as the
optical drive, things get very messy, very quickly.

It seems as if two S-ATA will overlay each IDE controller, so that you
can't (say) use a primary IDE plus S-ATA 0 or 1 at the same time.
There can be flakiness on boot order vs. enumeration order that can
cause XP to "see" the non-boot HD "first", etc.

And all that is before you get to RAID issues...



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