is raid worth it/suggestions 3 systems

[gamenutt]

alright... I have 3 systems (specs are at the bottom). I wanted to do a few things with them. Now as of hard drives I have 2 80 Gb ata 133 drives, 2 60gb ata 133, 1 40 gb ata 100, 1 20 gb ata 100 which I want to split up between the 3 networked systems. I do a lot with video editing so I thought on system 1 I would set up a raid 0 array with the 2 80 gb ata 133 drives. Is it worth setting this up for video editing? Never dealt with raid but has sounded like a good idea. But to do this I would need to get a pata to sata convertor or a sata dongle....correct? Never used one of those either so wasnt sure about it. wasnt sure where to put the other drives but I was thinking for system 3 I would set it up with a version of linux or unix to get experiance with the command line. So does anyone have any ideas on which version is stable and best to get the experiance of using the unix command line on? And can you network 2 windows xp machines with a unix or linux machine without any problems? Or if anyone else has any suggestions on how I should set these machines up that be great? I do a lot of video editing, graphic design, and getting into 3d modeling and animation.

system 1:
windows xp pro
pentium 4 2.53 Ghz
asus p4s8x mobo
radeon 9600 128mb
2 x 512 Mb ddr pc 2700 ram
sound blaster audigy 2 platinum
sony dvdr/w -dru510a
pinnacle studio deluxe board
cambridge soundworks fps2000 digital speakers

system 2:
windows xp pro
pentium 3 800 Mhz
sblive value
geforce 4 ti 4200 64mb
256mb sdram
tdk 50x cdr/w
not sure on mobo I know its intel chipset

system 3:
windows xp pro
pentium 3 600 Mhz
geforce 256 32mb
192mb sdram
250Mb zip drive
not sure about the rest

 

[Quige]

RAID is useful for either speed or data integrety depending on whether you go for 0 or 1, and either the motherboard will support it or an addin PCI RAID card.

As long as you have your 2 80GB disks both on seperate IDE channels as master before you set them up as a RAID 0 array, you should get a performance boost on writes and reads (more on one than the other but I can't remember which way round at the moment)

If you have them on a single channel then I think you loose any speed benefit, and it essentially becomes a waste of time. This may well not apply for SATA. Not sure which of the drives you've mentioned are SATA and will need the dongle/convertor?

With the machines you've told about, I'd actually be tempted to set my working machine up with RAID0 with the 60GB drives, and then set system2 up with the 2 80GB drives as RAID1 and use this as a backup location, unless the 80's are a lot faster than the 60's.

 

[gamenutt]

thanks... yea so I think raid is worth it and one of my hard drives isnt sata its that my motherboard doesnt support raid with 2 ide channels, only 1 ide and/or 2 sata. So I believe I need to get a pata to sata convertor. And thats a decent idea for the back up. But is there any probs with networking 2 windows xp machines with a linux or unix os. And for experiance purposes what os should I go with if there arent any probs with networking.

 

[Quige]

As to the Linux/XP interoperability I've only ever played with Mandrake Linux, so not really the best person to ask about that.

I've always had not much luck getting Windows networking/browsing working with Linux, despite any number of Samba config GUI tools, (and or direct editing of the conf file) though I recall I did find one in the latest Mandrake release I looked at that allowed me to map/mount windows shares into the file system, which is fine if you know the share you're after.

Alternatively I've never had any problems connecting via FTP between Linux and Windows. Set up a FTP server on the Linux box and you can use your favourite FTP client to move files between the boxes.

I think it'll be a matter of sucking and seeing.

I downloaded the Debian iso's recently but haven't had time to install and look at it, but it's meant to be one of the more stable releases.

 

[Testin da Cable]

windows and unix can network together just fine.

sell system 2 and 3, get more drives (mind that they are the same size/speed/make) and a hardware raid card.

 

[Quige]

Originally posted by Testin da Cable
windows and unix can network together just fine.

I know they can, I've just been crap at getting 'browsing' working

 

[Testin da Cable]

unix to windows or windows to unix?