Is One SATA Drive Good?

[bobafett573]

ok, i have a 40gb IDE hard drive in my computer now and it just can't hold as much as i need it to. I'm thinking of buying a new hard drive and i wanted to get a SATA one since my new motherboard supports it but i'm not really sure if it's worth the extra money. i know SATA is advantageous when using multiple SATA drives but is just having one advantageous? how does RAID work? i know my motherboard has 6 raid controllers and support raid 0, raid 1, and raid 0+1 but i have no idea what that even means. thanks for the help!

 

[Jonesie]

I have a 40GB SATA harddrive, and using it solo is fine. There are many advantages to having a SATA drive. They are quite fast when it comes to reading and writing to the drive. As far as RAID goes, I wouldn't worry about it. Many RAID scenarios only make a mirror image of the other drive that it is connected to, and in a dramatic hardware failure this would not be a good solution if both drives for some reason became inoperable. If you keep your eyes open, and if you are willing to look for some deals on the net, you can probably get a large SATA drive for a fair amount of money.