Raid Zero

No, this is not the title of the latest action movie. Go see Aeon Flux. Its supposed to be a spoof movie so I'm sure it will be funny, however I think they saw that they can make more money by marketing it as a real movie... anyway, its probably shit, but even shittyer if you rent it out.

Enough about movies.

Raid zero, as I'm sure you are aware is a computing err thingy. Raid is supposed to provide a backup to the data in one hard drive, by mirroring it in another (thats raid 1). Raid 0 isnt technicly a raid becuase it does not provide this backup feature... Anyway, raid 0 just speeds up your read and write and the throughput. This is done by having 2 hdd acting as one.

atm I'm thinking of upgrading my hdd space as I only have 4 gigs left... not quite enough to do what I want to do... So the idea of using raid. More specifcily raid 0 with sata drives has caught my attention. It will cost more. But you get twice the speed in access times and in writting to the hdd.

My computer is about 3 years old. It still works fine. Can play games that came out during that era... Graphics card is ok, just doesnt have the lates "shading version 3.0"... I have more ram than I know what to do with. HDD space is the problem. But what if I could also improve the overall speed of the system by increasing the speed of the hdd. How much would this be worth. Another consideration is money. As always money is an issue. My computer does not natively support SATA (I or II). So I can buy a SATA card. Which adds to the cost of a SATA setup. I could go with a raid 0 on my standard ultra 100, but I dont know if my motherboard supports raid... Supposedly its an option, but I cant remember if I included it :(

Should just open it up and find out. It would make the over all experiance cheaper, but not as fast. And if I did buy a new computer in the future, would I take the parts out of this computer and put in the new one? Not likely. I think if I did use SATA the make hhd space I could get would be 160gigs. When I was really looking at installing 250gigs of IDE. The SATA converter card can only handle SATA I, The only SATA I hdd I can find is an 80 gig, or 300+... Seems to be missing a bit of the middle section... So bascily thats 160 gigs, anything bigger and I have to move upto SATA II which is a waste of technology or a more expensive SATA card. Even Excel is unable to help fully with this issue. Well I just dont feel like setting up a decision matrix for this...