to raid or not

[maryuk]

hello all i am thinking of putting a raid card in my pc so i can add another two harddrives i have a dvd burner a dvd drive a 20 and 60 gigs drive tv card with a 350 watt psu winxp 1.4 pro 526 ram do you thin this will stress my system or over heat things and advice would be very welcome thanks lads love mary

[Ken17625]

You might need a bigger power supply..............

[ATLien]

Originally posted by maryuk
hello all i am thinking of putting a raid card in my pc so i can add another two hard drives i have a dvd burner a dvd drive a 20 and 60 gigs drive tv card with a 350 watt psu winxp 1.4 pro 526 ram do you thin this will stress my system or over heat things and advice would be very welcome thanks lads love mary

Are you adding the hard drives for speed/processing, or for storage?

[ATLien]

Also, you can only run a "raid" set-up, if the hard drives are the same, and do you know what type of "raid" set-up you want to configure?

[Meuzzin]

I had 2 80's, a 160, and 2 120's, and a 10,000 RPM Ultra 3 SCSI drive in my system. I had a 350w PSU, a Silicon Image Raid Controller, all in a mid tower case.

First problem: Heat. I had 6 fans in the case. Still ran way to hot. Ended up keeping a box fan in front of it at all times.

Second: Drag on the power supply. So much so, one day, I came home and my house smelled like fried PCBA. Upon further inspection, I find my power supply blew, taking 3 hard drives with it:(

So my suggestion is this: Get a Server Class case, with no less than a 450w PSU. And plenty of cooling.

[maryuk]

thanks sounds too hard for a newbee like me may have to go with a usb harddrive but there dam exspensive here in uk than you for your input lads ps this is a great place for help again thanks

[Ken17625]

You can find external USB hard drives cheap on eBay.

Althougth with your location (UK), i'm not sure if you'll have the same selection I did when I purchased mine (better or worse).

[ATLien]

Originally posted by maryuk
thanks sounds too hard for a newbee like me may have to go with a usb hard drive but there dam expensive here in uk than you for your input lads ps this is a great place for help again thanks

Raid set-ups are great, but are also prone to over heat. I've fried two hard drives with in a year and a half. So what i did, i got a couple of WD Caviar hard drives, because they have an 8MB cache. Thats enough speed for me to work with. SCSI's are great for high speed, but they don't have enough gigs for me, and they are much too expensive.

[maryuk]

thanks again i will stick with usb i think

[Ken17625]

If you're going to go with an external HD, I recommend Buslink.

My drive is USB 2.0 compatible and it's also backward compatible with the USB 1.1 specification.

[random]

um if you want a bigger usb hd go with western digital they go tup to 300 or 350 gigs