SATA Questions

[paintballax4ever]

Yeah, I was just pondering about SATA and the other things that are involved in it, and I was just wondering what are the advantages of it?

What is a RAID setup?

Could I run one SATA drive on a mobo and that's it, because I've been cruising in this forum, and it seems like everyone who uses SATA connections have 2 or more drives.

Are there disadvantages?

I've searched the forums for about 10 minutes, and I haven't really found a thread that has the information I needed...not even the 'ANSWERS' thread.

Thanks for the answers!

 

[unhappy_mage]

RAID is when two or more disks appear as a single disk. They can either be mirrors (same data on each drive, raid1) or striped (alternate blocks go to alternate disks, raid0). Raid0 used to be the fad, but it doesn't really help performance in most things, and if one disk dies you lose everything.

You don't have to have 2 disks for SATA, but you need at least 2 for raid.

 

[paintballax4ever]

Oh I see...thanks for the answers that really cleared my mind of a couple of things; but do yo know the advantages and disadvantages of SATA?

 

[defakto]

sata will be the replacement, eventually, for standard ide, smaller cables, higher theoretical transfer rates. You can have as many sata drives as you have sata ports, at least until sata II rolls out, then you can have even more but, that's another story.