SATA 11 expansion card. PCI-e x1

[Tnega]

AM in need of upping my SATA 2 connections in my pc.
Dont know if I need RAID 1/0 etc...looking for help.
Also...
Would an external SATA connector for an external HDD be better/faster than a USB2 one?

Help needed deciding.

Reccomendations and pointers gratefully accepted in advance.

Agent.

 

[MeetYourMaker]

Off the top of my head, shouldnt be a problem getting a card. PCIE 2x esata 2x sata2 would be around £15-20

For one capable of basic RAID, same price but you lose the esata ports

If you already have sata ports that are RAID capable on the MB then youd be better off moving stuff around rather than buying a cheap RAID card.

An esata connected drive should be faster than USB2.0

 

[Tnega]

Thanks MYM.
The bit about raid compliant sata mobo, I have one but have a dvd rw and a blu ray plus 2 hdd's plugged in at the mo.
looking to add another hdd or 2.
Sooooo no other way to bypass this other than an add-in card?

regards,
Agent.

 

[MeetYourMaker]

Nope addon card, change MB or remove drives and replace with bigger ones, cant think of anything else.

The point about the MB doing RAID was that theres no point buying an addon card that has RAID capability, youll either pay more for it or lose some ports. As the MB already does RAID just rearrange some stuff around, eg you want a RAID1 setup, buy a std addon card, move the DVDRW and bluray to the addon card and put the HDD's onto the MB ports and setup as RAID.

Might not be 100% as straight forward as that due to RAID and std drivers usually being different but its near enough.

 

[Tnega]

Thanks again MYM. Now understood
tbh ive never gotten into the pro's and cons of raid.
never really thought i would benefit from it.
i understand its handy for backups, which isnt an issue for me as i have format:c and this here interweb thingy and dont store any personal files on pc.
I stand to be educated in all things RAID non-the-less.

 

[MeetYourMaker]

Quite simply if you dont need the security of RAID for files saved on your PC then you dont need it, consider it as making a copy a file to more than 1 HDD at the same time when you write to disk so there is always a backup.

The other advanatge of RAID would be an increased disk performance, but for everyday use you dont need it.

Oh yeh and its a choice of performance or backup, not both.

Im sure there will be people that could state the merits of different RAID levels performance/security and hardware over software but for the purpose of this thread that simplistic explanation is enough info

 

[Tnega]

enough info indeed.
At the risk of sounding all crawly bum lick, once again I Thank You.