Hi,

Here's what I got:

-- 80gb system drive
-- 20 gb internal which mainly just hosts my windows/photoshop swap files, though it has a few documents here and there
-- 80 gb external usb drive that I store most of my data on
-- 160 gb external firewire drive
-- 13 gb internal which is not in use

(also, 1gb ram, 2.something ghz 64mb processor, etc...)

I'm a hobbyist who uses this machine (which I built) a lot of graphics, audio, and video. I'm interested in optimizing it by experimenting with a RAID 0 configuration, which I know very little about. I understand that RAID drives should but don't necessarily have to be identical depending on the Can I do anything with the 20 and 13 perhaps by creating a 7gb partition
to even them out? Or do I need another 20gb drive and just use the 13 for my swap file?
How much can I expect to benefit from RAID given my current setup? Is RAID ever done with external drives?

I'm just looking for general ideas, info or recommendations. Thanks!

RAID is simple to work out. Hook the drives to the IDE connectors on the RAID controller, jump them like you would any other hard drive {master and slave on each channel}, enable the raid controller in the BIOS {if its onboard}, reboot and when the RAID configuration screen comes up hit the key combination it asks you to enter the configuration utility {just after the POST}, when the configuration utility comes up follow the onscreen instructions to build the RAID set you want and pick the drives you want to use in the RAID set. Here’s a little info on RAID as some mfg.’s use the number nomenclature:
RAID 0 :
stripe set {fastest but you really should use the same size and type of hard drives}
spanned volume {normal speed but any size drives can be used to ether with no size loss}

I'm not totally sure on this, as I don't use RAID yet myself.

I would think that you could do it although I'm not sure on this one.

I hope this helps.

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If your motherboard has a built in RAID chip, it will only do RAID on IDE drives (could also be for SCSI drives). I don't think you could do a hardware RAID setup between IDE and USB/Firewire drives. But if you run Windows NT/2000 server you could do a software raid.

If your motherboard has IDE RAID or you purchase a card, you could also purchase another 80gb IDE drive and setup RAID 1 (mirroring).

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