[Undertaker989]

If I wanted to create 2 raid0 arrays, would i need to purchase 2 raid controller cards?

the card:

Newegg.com - Rosewill RC-200 PCI IDE (ATA) Silicon Image RAID (0/1/0+1/JBOD) Host Controller Card - Controllers / RAID Cards

A single card has 2 IDE inputs and I'm assuming the only way to get RAID0 to work would be to have each drive in the array plugged directly into each input on the controller card, as opposed to plugging in 2 drives to 1 IDE cable.

[SoulAssassin]

Yeah - if the card only accepts two devices then you'd need two cards for IDE devices.

Edit: damn at $10 I may get one for my parent's old PC

[Phant0m51]

Why would you want 2 raid 0's? That's 4 hard disks where if any of them fails, you just lost half your data from 1 set of raid. Personally I see no point in raid 0 unless you need absolutely the best performance you can get, but it's still not a big enough gain for the possibility of losing everything with 1 drive failure.

*edit* Hard drive failures don't happen to everyone, but for every HD you add to an array, you increase your chances of having one fail.

[Phant0m51]

Directly from wikipedia:

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

Another use is where the number of disks is limited by the operating system. In Microsoft Windows, the number of drives may be limited by the availability of drive letters. RAID 0 allows more disks to be used by combining them under a single letter. It is possible in Windows 2000 and newer to mount partitions under directories, thus eliminating the need for a partition to be assigned a drive letter.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit

[Undertaker989]

this will be my work powerhouse box: Multimedia creation, file storage, design, encoding, torrents downloading, etc.

I have 2 40gb ide's and 1 80 gb ide. I have 2 p4 systems from my dad's office waiting for me to do something with them. My plan is this:

-2 40 gb's -raid0 for windowsXP only - backed up to my internal removable storage via driveImageXML or equivelent (uses shadow copy, so you don't need to reboot or anything)
-purchase another 80 gig ide and put that on another raid0 for an application partition (change crogram files to d:\program files during installs
-purchase one of those new sata2 Terrabyte drives w/ the 32MB cache + 2 5.25 SATA hotswap bays - enables me to xfer huge amounts of files from computer to computer and I can also pull out my backup drive at any time I want to bring anywhere I want. Alls I need is a SATA to USB adapter, and I can pull my drive out and bring it to a friends house for file xfer goodness.

-migrate all archives and storage of my large groups of files from all the computers in my appartment to the TB drive, zipping/compressing old data, burning data more than 2 years old to Dual Layer DVD's, etc...

-run synergy on it so I can use my main keyboard and mouse for both my main computer/gaming rig and my powerhouse box. I can also have the computer + monitor right next to my main rig.

-take pictures when this is done

edit: regarding the reliability of raid0 - I don't really care about that too much: 1.) i'll be running backups on both arrays to my 3g/sec SATA removable backup drive, and the IDE drives are so cheap anyways, that all I'll have to do is replace the drive-format array-re-image.

I also plan on running a few virtual machines on this work powerhouse for prototyping and sandboxing.

[Phant0m51]

Okily dokily, it's your time/money

You will need 2 of those raid controllers. If you had both drives on the same cable, you wouldn't be getting any performance increase at all.

[MSP]

My old Promise TX-2000 would support 4 drives, but it was almost 100 bucks too. But in my mind you get what you pay for. RAID isn't something I'd be willing to go cheap on.

[Undertaker989]

from the reviews, the rosewill card is stable enough. I'm not going to be using new drives on it anyway. I mostly need the drives/controller to last about 8 months or so until I build a new gaming system. After that, I'll upgrade my current PC to sata2 raid0 similar setup as mentioned above, w/ all critical/important data + partition on the backup drive.