Need tech advice on abit kt7a raid board

[damnlimey]

I've just been given an abit kt7a raid board along with a 800mhz athlon .
Rather than spend hours or days searching the net for advice I thought I'd throw it
out to the techs at FR first.My questions are:

Is there an appreciable speed advantage to using the raid technology and 2 drives?(stripping?)
What video card should I get?
Are there any heatsink/fan choices that work better than others?(dual fans?)
What type of memory ,I know this board supports pc133 but is it DDR compatible.

Any other advice would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks.

[go star go]

dang. santa in town or something?

[go star go]

btw, i'm a database man so raid is for protection...

[damnlimey]

No,my brother just upgraded to 1.4 Athlon and gave me all his old bits.

[tbeatty]

Software raid is about 10% so hardware raid is going to be more than that. Considering that you can get 2 drives for abou the same price as 1 that is twice as large, I'd go for it.

But I'd recommend getting 3 drives and use the striping/parity raid option so that you get both incresaed speed and reliability.

[Fighting Irish]

Whenever I feel my processors are moving too slow I simply remember the days of the Commodor,cassette tape programs and 2400 baud modem.

[Oschisms]

2 disks configured as a RAID 0 (Striped with no fault tolerance) is definitely faster than running 2 disks as a master/slave configuration.

Personally, I've got a RAID 1 (Mirroring) because it reduces my need for backups, but it all depends on what you want.

[Oschisms]

You're right, RAID 5 is best, but my ABIT P III RAID motherboard only supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0, and Span (JBOD)I hope he has more options than that, but if their Athlon mboards are similar, then those are the options he's got as well.

[RadioAstronomer]

Look into the Gforce2 Pro with 64Megs DDR ram for your vid card. Will work very well and not be nearly as pricey as a Geforce3. :)

[RadioAstronomer]

PC-133 should work just fine for this system and not cost an arm or a leg. Due to mail in rebates, I was able to get 512Megs of PC-133 for free from Comp USA. :)

[Oschisms]

BTW, the mirror is for my backup server. I am totally aware that it is the worst config performance wise. My main workstation is a single hard disk machine.

Note to self: Whew, there's plenty of time to look like a fool on tech threads, no need to do so within the first 10 posts.

[tjg]

Talk about coincidences, I just read a review of that board on http://www.anandtech.com earlier today. If you go over there most of your questions will be answered. Try their forums for additional info.

I've been trying to find a good article that talks about raid. Let me know if you find some good info on that.

Both Anand and Tom's Hardware have some good info on Heat sinks and fans. If you are not going to overclock you don't have to be concerned about going dual fan. Another consideration is noise. All those fans in the box make a racket, you might want to think about an effective but quiet cooling solution.

What video card depends on what you want to do. Both the above sites have lots of info. Get one that doesn't have a fan if you are concerned about noise.

Finally if you want a rea challenge and are interested in building a quiet box go to http://home.swipnet.se/tr/silence.html. Be prepared to spend some time.

[randog]

Is there an appreciable speed advantage to using the raid technology and 2 drives?(stripping?)

As opposed to what? The main advantage to using RAID is data security, i.e. if one drive in your array goes down you can replace the drive and rebuild the lost data from a mirrored or parity drive.

[LibKill]

I'm just a semi-computer-literate guy who can use a screwdriver, bolt parts together and pray that they work.

But the tech_index guys will know how to make it work.

[Oschisms]

Brush up on your RAID

[billbears]

Does anybody remember when 512 megs of ANY type RAM would have cost the same as a down payment on a car? Running Raid 1 myself and it is an appreciable difference in search speed. I've had a drive crash before and wasn't able to retrieve anything off that drive so I've learned my lesson there

[IoCaster]

You'll find everything you need right here

Click the link!!

[Oschisms]

Arrrgh; You're right- I wasn't specific enough in my earlier post. My RAID 1 is faster reading (because there are 2 drives to read from) but slower writing. (Because it has to write data twice.)

[Deagle]

Is there an appreciable speed advantage to using the raid technology and 2 drives?(stripping?)

I currently run a Abit KT7A-Raid with 1200 mhz in Raid-0 configuration.
Raid-0 provides a significant disk speed increase.

What video card should I get?

A Geoforce 2 MX card would give you a good price/performance
ratio. Geoforce 3 better but more expensive.

What type of memory ,I know this board supports pc133 but is it DDR compatible.

Motherboard does not support DDR, pc133 is fine.

For further information on the KT7A-Raid motherboard, go to
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm.

[RadioAstronomer]

I remember when 256K ram chips were 12$ each for an XT I was building. Total; 432$ for 1 meg. For 512 Megs it would have cost me 221,184.00$ back then. (1984).