Serial ATA II v. Raid?

**RedGTiVR6** · 07-17-2005, 07:14 PM

I'm sure it sounds stupid to come of you, but what's the difference? What are the pros and cons to each?

**peterh** · 07-17-2005, 08:36 PM

Serial ATA II is an expansion of Serial ATA 1.0
Serial ATA = is a type of physical interface. It's the way Hard Disks, CDROMs etc connect to the motherboard. Like the Parallel IDE interface but newer and faster. Another type of interface is SCSI

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) = is a system of using multiple hard drives for sharing or replicating data among the drives (taken from here) it's used to provide faster storage or failure tollerance of storaged data or both.

u see they are not the same thing so u can't compare pros and cons. But with a SATA u can have RAID(also with SCSI but costs a lot) but with the older Parallel IDE u can't.

**wizardPC** · 07-17-2005, 08:43 PM

What do you want to do with your computer?

See, the serial ATA drives are not actually any faster than IDE drives of the same rotational speed (ie, 7200rpm). In fact, they are the same drives just with different controllers. But, they don't make any 10,000rpm IDE drives and they DO make them in SATA. I have 2 36gb 10Krpm drives that are in a RAID, and my computer smokes one without that setup. I bought them because I was into video editing for a while and the bottleneck for rendering was the hard drive speed. If all you're doing is playing games and typing term papers, it's not woth it. But if you want to cut down your render time for something like video authoring (maybe AutoCAD?) then it would be worthwhile.

**RedGTiVR6** · 07-17-2005, 09:49 PM

well in that case....the RAID array isn't worth it for me then...lol

I don't do any video editing at this point in time and I don't forsee myself getting into it in such depth that I would need such a set-up....by the time I ever got into it that deep there would probably be something newer out or it would be time to upgrade again anyways...lol

I'm just looking to build a new computer...the one I've had is about 6 years old and the only thing Ive upgraded is the memory....(to give you an idea, it runs RAMM...lol)