Question about SATA raid

[jerry]

I am a speed freak when it comes to my favorite past time. I have purchased a new MSI Neo2 FISTER mother board and am going to use two Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM hard drives in raid 0, I have 2 gigs of pc2100 RAM, and a P4 2.53/533 fsb prosessor, that should fly pretty good the best I can figure. My problem is that the WD hard drives are only 36 gigs in size. If I have them raid 0, can I still use my ultra ATA EIDE hard drives for storage? Or once I set the system for raid on the serial drives does that render my EIDE ULTRA ATA drives unuseable?

 

[jerry]

Thanks for the input. When you say that things on the RAID array won't be part of the storage drives I still have a question. If I have a video stored on ultra ATA 133 drive and want to edit it in adobe premier which is on my raid drives, will it be able to access that data? Thanks again.

 

[Inaris]

Yes. The data will be intact as long as you don't destroy it. If you put the drives into the raid array, then you will loose it, cause you will have to create a new partition on the drive.
If you have the option and the money, go with RAID 0+1. That will give you both the speed and the fault tolerance.

 

[jerry]

The problem with raid 0+1 would still be the same as my origional, as far as I know the system will see all drives as the volume of the smallest drive in the array. With the 10,000 rpm raptor having a volume of 36 gigs I would only have a total of 72 gigs of storage space.