>What is the difference between "Raid," and "Non-Raid," PCI cards ?
I assume you mean RAID ATA PCI cards, although most of the below also applies to SCSI cards. In fact, RAID was designed for high-end SCSI drives, and is only available on ATA drives because the Macintosh sees drives attached through PCI ATA controllers as SCSI drives. RAID ATA cards provide a hardware RAID solution, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Currently on hardware ATA RAID cards this can only be RAID 0, known as striping. By striping your data across several disks using a hardware RAID card, both disks remain busy with I/O rather than placing all the I/O on a single disk. This increases (sometimes significantly) the amount of megabytes that can be read from/written to your disk per second. Non-RAID ATA cards have no RAID hardware on-board, meaning you just get standard ATA throughput. However, several quality ATA cards ship with SoftRAID or another software RAID solution. Basically, with software RAID you can still stripe your data over several inexpensive ATA drives for increased throughput, even without the RAID hardware. Software RAID also allows you to mirror (in most cases) a drive, providing a redundant source of data should one drive go bad. This is known as RAID 1. To do this, you need a matched pair of hard drives, each drive holding a mirror image of the other. RAID is only desirable if you want to squeeze more performance out of your system, capture uncompressed video, or provide secure and fast disk access over a network. It is also helpful when used as a scratch disk for Photoshop. If you are just looking to add large ATA drives to your computer, you will save a lot of money by buying a non-RAID ATA controller. You can always add software RAID later, which in my opinion is a much more flexible RAID solution anyway. I hope this answers your question. -- --Chris PM 7500/604e 200Mhz 4 gig SCSI 256 megs OS 8.6 (This machine rocks!) -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
