Well - as long as I'm taking time out to check back in here, I thought maybe I could get some insight on my current conumdrum!
I finally updated my PC. I bought a DELL
Hold the jokes! I never thought I'd be a Dell owner, but this past year we've picked up 3 of them off of their Outlet site for the nieces and my sis-in-law, and I gotta say - pretty impressive!
My new setup is an XPS 410 - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 (6700) - 4GB RAM - nVidia GS 7900 - 2x250GB HDDs - 2 DVD burners - 8 USB / 3 1394 ports - XP Pro (my first legit copy lol), free upgrade to Vista Biz - and soooooooooooooooooo quiet - my old system sounds like a 747 now! All of that for $1,300 from the Outlet - priced on the regular site - $2,400! Not toooo shabby...
OK - so yeah - there's my justification for getting a Dell
Anyway - so the confusing part... All of the RAID / SATA crap is new to me - I've always just had IDE.
The system came w/ a RAID 1 configuration. I already have plenty of external network storage that handles my backup, so RAID 1 is not for me. I'd rather use the other 250GB for stuff. RAID 0 is just tooooo risky for me too... don't want to lose it all if one drive goes down...
So - I went into the Intel RAID controller / BIOS (ctrl+I) and disabled RAID for both drives - everything works great. The next step was to go into the system BIOS and I have two options:
RAID On
or
Autodetect / ATA
When I went to Autodetect I was BSOD - so I found an MS knowledge article that gave me all of the info to merge into the registry to load all of the IDE drivers - atapi, pciide, pciidx etc... That allowed me to now set it to Autodetect and boot fine...
Here's my question (finally):
Is there any benefit to me leaving the BIOS setting to RAID On?? In the BIOS it says:
IMPORTANT: The 'RAID On' option may be used even when there is only one hard drive on the system. Dell recommends this for improved system performance.
Anyone know the Pros / Cons of the two options? RAID On or Autodetect??
Like - w/ RAID On, will I have problems w/ boot disks etc due to drivers? Is there any performance increase if I'm not actually using a RAID configuration? Will I lose performance by not using the Intel RAID controller and just going Autodetect??
My goal is to partition both drives into equal halves. Drive 0 will be setup for dual boot XP Pro and Vista Biz (or ultimate) and Drive 1 will be storage - video editing and stuff...
Opinions - Insights??
If this post isn't long enough, here's my
other post on the subject at the Dell site.
Thanks!!!
Linear Mode
