Help me build a PC under 70 - 80K

[drvarunmehta]

That's completely wrong. In RAID 1 data is NOT retrieved from both HDD's simultaneously.

 

[Kniwor]

That's completely wrong. In RAID 1 data is NOT retrieved from both HDD's simultaneously.

That is something which depends on the Raid card. It can be done and it cannot be.
The only thing I doubt is that integrated cards wont do it, and which makes Raid 0 the only choice for people not willing to spend in a card. But to that i have already said, it's a matter of personal choice, and the money u need to spend. Raid 0 is obviously cheaper.

Mirroring: Read performance under mirroring is far superior to write performance. Let's suppose you are mirroring two drives under RAID 1. Every piece of data is duplicated, stored on both drives. This means that every byte of data stored must be written to both drives, making write performance under RAID 1 actually a bit slower than just using a single disk; even if it were as fast as a single disk, both drives are tied up during the write. But when you go to read back the data? There's absolutely no reason to access both drives; the controller, if intelligently programmed, will only ask one of the drives for the data--the other drive can be used to satisfy a different request. This makes RAID significantly faster than a single drive for reads, under most conditions

from here,
*www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perfReadWrite.html

Although RAID 1's focus is on redundancy, mirroring can improve performance by allowing read requests to be distributed between the two drives (although not all RAID 1 implementations take advantage of this opportunity).

from here
*techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=1

 

[drvarunmehta]

What you say about RAID 1 may be true if you have a dedicated RAID controller but most people use onboard RAID. I'm not sure if that has the same features as a dedicated controller.

Anyways that is beside the point because most people won't want to buy 2 HDD's and be able to use only half the storage space without a very, very good reason. RAID 1 is really not recommended for ordinary usage. Better to use an external HDD to backup data.

 

[Kniwor]

guys, here's best of both worlds
*www.dvdoctor.net/content/item.php?item=1006&page=3


@sam9s

I see u are using P5B variant, maybe u can try this out sometime and let us know, BTW pls post the read/write benchmarks of ur setup.