Need help on SATA vs IDE configuration....

[paqman]

Sorry, I couldn't come up with a better title for this post. I'm faced with a little problem, because my mobo only has two serial ports, and they're both already used up, one with a 40GB drive, and one with a 160GB drive. I don't want to give up either drive, but I need to add on another drive.

It's been suggested that I could run the OS on a drive that's connected with an adapter, like this one, and it even sounds like I would get the SATA 1.5Gb/s speed using that. But assuming you didn't and you had to knock it down to IDE speed, what would be optimum, running the OS on a lower speed drive, or running the data on a lower speed drive?

Also, for those of you who know anything about RAID:
Also, what if I just had two really big drives, and I made a partition on one of them, and installed the OS on that partition. Could I set the other partition and the other drive up together in a RAID format, perhaps in JBOD (just a bunch of disks) mode? Not sure if that makes sense hopefully so.

Anyway, any thoughts would be appreciated.

[minibeardeath]

i believe that you want the OS on the primary and fastest drive because thats the drive where all the drivers and other nessecary applications would be. also a slower drive would most likely affect the overall performance as could the extra wiring because there is more resistance (but dont quote me on the very last part)
hope this helps.

[paqman]

Thanks for the reply. I decided to get an SATA RAID controller, so I could add more SATA drives. Now I've got the OS running on the 40GB SATA, and I've got a 160GB and 300GB SATA's for storage, and another 100GB IDE for storage. I know it's a piece by piece job, but I got plenty of storage for now!