Recommend IDE Raid Card ?

[phillyman2004]

I have an EXTENSIVE collection of old videogames , Everything from Atari 2600 to Nintendo 64

Anyways , I have eaten up a 250 gig harddrive so far , Now i have bought another 250 that is the same drive

I want to Raid them together , just for File storage , I figure 466gig should be enough , They are both IDE drives (Western Digital 250 IDE 8mb cache)

No OS will be on these drives , i have a 80 gig drive for my OS

Any Recommendations on a brand , something possibly under $40 - $50

This is just for Roms and Emulators, so i dont need anything spectacular

Thanks

Rob

PS , when my collection grows past these 2 drives , can i add a 3rd ? Or do i have to have 4 drives ?

Edited July 1, 2005 by phillyman2004

[egrath]

Hi,

try to get an Adaptec 2400 on ebay. They are relatively fast and very reliable. Or if you want to go with something a little bit slower and maybe cheaper: Get a Promise FastTrack Controller.

Bye, Egon

[Rob00GT]

If you're running Windows XP why not let the operating system do it for you. By making both your Western Digital drives "dynamic drives" you can span them, create a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array, etc. Just install the drives, click Start, right-click My Computer, click Manage. When the Computer Management window pops up, click on Disk Management. Right click on the drive you want and convert away.

The disadvantage is that it takes some cpu cycles to manage the drives. An advantage (beyond the cost savings of not buying a RAID controller) is that if your computer crashes and you reload Windows you can still access those dynamic drives. You can even yank 'em out and put them in another computer. Try that with a RAID controller!

Just a suggestion.