HTPC hardware

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Tuesday 25 November 2003 01:32 pm, brad wrote:

> I want to run IDE RAID so that read/write speeds are
> better.  Is there a difference between a MB with an onboard RAID
> controller and a PCI RAID controller?  

In order to get speed, you want RAID 5, striping.  All of the motherboards 
I've seen only do mirroring, only between two drives.  I'm not sure about the 
PCI cards, but those I've seen were all mirror-only and I suspect that it's 
generally true.  However, a good IDE drive should be sufficient for what you 
need, unless you're doing multiple streams to disk at the same time.

There are drives that are rated for video/multimedia use, they are more stable 
with temperature changes, but I think the current reliability of OTC stuff is 
perfectly adequate.