I personally have not worked on any RAID systems..they are and can be a benefit to those doing a huge amount of tracks and so forth. RAID is a little expensive and can get pretty indepth technically on setting them up efficiently. SCSI is really the way to go for hobbyist' sake. RAID is a redundant system that sends data to as many drives as you have attached to it for backup purposes..so in essence you really only have one drive so to speak but with the data on that drive sent to the other drives on that chain. If you are only doing 24 or less tracks I wouldnt go that route. Staying with two internal drives is fine for that application. The most common choice is go with an external SCSI drive..SCSI is fast and gives you great performance. Again, with ATA 100 drives and 7200RPM IDE it's very comprable. Hope that helps
Opus

Originally posted by Opus2000:
RAID is a redundant system that sends data to as many drives as you have attached to it for backup purposes..so in essence you really only have one drive so to speak but with the data on that drive sent to the other drives on that chain.

actually, that's only one type of raid array (a mirroring array), and is not what you want for maximum data xfer. what Avids etc use is a striped array, in which data is broken into x chunks, x being the number of drives defined as the array...so each drive is only getting a portion of the whole data picture, which increases the potential throughput with each drive added to the array. the 3rd type of array is spanned, which can make multiple drives appear as one to the computer...doesn't increase performance any, but helps if your project is xtra big yet you still wanna fit it on one drive. kinda outdated nowadays...

Originally posted by Opus2000:
RAID is a little expensive and can get pretty indepth technically on setting them up efficiently.

all you need is FWB hard disc toolkit or such and a couple drives...no biggie at all really...

Originally posted by Opus2000:
SCSI is really the way to go for hobbyist' sake.

i don't think that's true anymore...you mentioned ATA/100 drives as spec'ing as good, and i've been having no probs lately with ATA/66 drives in a PTLE system. the only arguements i've still been hearing are reliability issues, scsi still being much better supposedly, and i haven't been using ATA long enough to comment on that one yet. i figure as long as the drive comes with the standard 3 year warrantee i hopefully shouldn't get too screwed (and i do BU all the time!!!!). and the damn ATA's are just soooo cheap!

Originally posted by Rader Ranch:

i don't think that's true anymore...you mentioned ATA/100 drives as spec'ing as good, and i've been having no probs lately with ATA/66 drives in a PTLE system. the only arguements i've still been hearing are reliability issues, scsi still being much better supposedly, and i haven't been using ATA long enough to comment on that one yet. i figure as long as the drive comes with the standard 3 year warrantee i hopefully shouldn't get too screwed (and i do BU all the time!!!!). and the damn ATA's are just soooo cheap!

Exactly my point!! Most people are led to believe that you have to go with SCSI which is nice but in my experience SCSI drives tend to go down faster than ATA drives. Used to have to get a ton of RMA's from Glyph when I worked at Sweetwater to get them repaired. You hardly had a bad drive or bad segment of a drive with ATA!
ATA 66 is definately a good spec but indeed that extra 33mhz boost is nice!
Thanks for the RAID info..as I stated I dont work with it much so my knowledge isnt all there on those specs!
good postings!!
Opus

Hello Gents, Just thought I'd pitch in with my 2 cents...I recently installed an ATA100 controller card in my PIII-600, I've got 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 30G 7200rpm drives running Master/Slave out of it. The controller has 2 ribbon cable(?) inputs. My 2 drives are on the first input, and I must say, with the Ram maxed out(384),running Win98se, my rig has never been so responsive, stable, and FAST.
I highly recommend this setup, and the kicker is how inexpensive the whole upgrade is. The controller is only $50, and the drives cost me $120 each !! All bought new , at Staples, if you can believe it.
Sturgis58 :D

Another thing to consider - most SCSI RAID
cards have an onboard processor that handles
the extra work involved, while, AFAIK, the
ATA-RAID devices (Promise et al) borrow some
time from the host CPU for this.

If your problem is number of tracks to disk,
ATA-RAID can help, as long as you can get the
device and its drivers to play nice with the
rest of your system (I've seen people having
some trouble with this with the Promise chips
in particular). On the other hand, you will
lose some CPU horsepower, so you may find
things like plugin counts dropping with RAID
installed...

Of course, given all the options these days,
PCs are almost as individual as their owners
so your mileage may indeed vary...

My $0.02 (Canadian),
John

Thanks all for the replies! RAID just seems to be safe for backup purposes. All is working well now so I'll stick with Opus' origional advice. Main drive one partition slave drive 2 data partitions. See new post for added questions! Thanks Again!!