hey everyone. Im building a computer for audio work, and I have a question:

I have two 80GB Seagate 8mb cache SATA drives. I also have an asus p4c800 deluxe mobo which has sata raid support.
What exactly would setting these up in a RAID 0 configuration do? Will I be left with an 80GB drive with faster speeds? Is it worth doing this?

Thanks for the help!

There's a lot of information about this on the net, I know for sure.

But I can give you some general information. Be glad that you have bought the SATA drives, these are considerably faster than normal UDMA ones. But if you cannot these two drives via a RAID 0 setup, the only thing it will do is use the second harddrive to make an exact copy of the first.
So everything you save or process on the first harddrive is simultaneously done on the second one. This creates an identical image which you can use for back-up.
However you will not have any speed increases. My suggestions to you would be to just connect the two harddrives, don't use the RAID options and enjoy the incredible speed benefits of the Serial ATA connection!

hope this helped...

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Your motherboard should be capable of two types of RAID array:

RAID 0
Also known as striping this array setup combines your drives to effectively make a larger drive (i.e. 80+80=160Gb). Not only that, it writes different bits of data to each drive at the same time, so you get much faster data throughput. However, if one of your disks fails you lose all your data (on both disks).

RAID 1
Also known as mirroring, this is what iLLicit was talking about. An exact copy of the data on one drive is written to the other, so that if either drive fails you haven't lost anything.

What not much people know is, you gain transfer rates with RAID 0, but the access time becomes almost double. So basically, you can say RAID 0 is good if you want a huge track count (lot's of audio tracks), but seriously, unless you work in a pro postproduction studio (where 100+ tracks are legion) a single HD will not really be used at its maximum. But if you use samplers like Gigastudio or similar, the latency problem will become obvious.

So if you're doing audio, I'd still recommend to use the 2 HD's separately. Use one for your applications, and one only for your audio data.

thanks for your input guys, I appreciate it