I just found out from my brother-in-law that my wife plans to get me a wd 74gb raptor, you know the 10krmp. I had been telling her I was getting a 36 and she told me to wait and I might get it. I have a MSI KT6V-LSR with a Athlon XP Barton 2600+ running well. I went to western digital website and saw the interface to be ESATA, Im thinking this Enhance SATA or something but anyway. My board supports SATA with RAID, now I just want to make sure that this hard drive will work just fine with my board. I wanted to know if any of ya fellas knew if this will work fine.

Evil
:darth:

Yes it will work fine, just remember you need to use the SATA driver floppy when you install Windows on it. Nice Gift BTW

Only ONE Raptor?

No RAID lovin' for you.

PS I'm jealous as I only have the lowly 36s. But then I do have TWO. :unch:

I wanted to know if its better to just get one 74 or 2 36 hard drives. My brother said my wife asked him if it would be better to get me 2 of the 36 hard drives in case one broke or just get me the 74.

Well you can look at it two ways, because with 2 36's theres two ways (of raid) to set them up.

You can put them in Raid0 (stripe), which means you'll get the full space of both of them, and access times will be cut in half - Windows will take data needed to be sent to the HD, and send half to each drive, increasing performance.

Or, you can put them in Raid1 (mirror), which means you will only get the space of one drive, and you dont get half access times like in Raid0, but if one fails then your PC will still work fine. Windows just writes the data to both drives, like a mirror, that way when one drive goes, theres the other still.

So saying two 36s is better than one 74 incase of one breaking isnt true, because if you run it in that setup, you only get 36GBs, half the space you bought.

Raid0, you get the full space of both drives, half the access times (which doesnt help anything at all expect video editing, and i mean no performance increase in 99% of applications), and if one drive fails, you lose the data for both of them.

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?threadid=4584
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT022201021241

Then again, you can ditch the whole raid and just run 2 drives, but thats the same as raid0 except no half access times, so you might as well :approve: