So I'm a former computer geek... I haven't been keeping up w/ things over the past 5 years or so; got too expensive to upgrade every year.

But, I was in need of a new hard drive yesterday, so I bought a Maxtor SATA, 100 Gb drive (don't really need more space right now; only have about 50 gigs worth on the current drive).

Anyhoo, this was the first SATA drive I've installed; took freaking forever, 'cause honestly, for the first time, I REALLY didn't knwo what I was doing. I wanted to make it the boot drive, and reinstall WindowsXP on it... After many hours of frustration w/ trying to get the Maxtor DOS software to work (wow...had to use the ol' LS-120 drive for the first time in years!!; their bootable CD-Rom sucked.), I finally gave up on that, and let the windows version copy it all over.

So finally, my question is this. Are there advantages to going w/ a SATA drive, other than the 7200 rpm speed, and the 150 Mb/s transfer rate? If there are other advantages of going w/ this drive, I'd like to know, just for shiites & giggles.

I'm not going to go w/ a RAID setup, as I don't need the storage space on the home computer, but what are the true advantages of it? I've found a few generic articles on the web, that just give generic descriptions like, "makes two or more hard drives act like one larger, faster drive", and crap like that, but what does that actually mean?

Looking for detail descriptions and/or links to detailed information; not just generic talk for the average guy... I hate all the dumbed down articles on the web these days. Just 'cause I'm a former comp. geek doesn't mean I don't speak the language!

Thanks!

Greetings, The SATA drive offers 2 things, Speed of access and Data transfer rates. Just as you surmised. RAID offers safety, not just storage space. I have 4 SATA drives in my Sony that are paired as mirrors so I have 2 logical drives shown to the OS. Logical drives using RAID or aggregated storage are sometimes refered to as virtualization or more generically as block aggregation.This offers safety in case a drive fails I do not lose mydata. On the speed side, any reads can be requested from each side of the mirror in round robin fashion. This effectively speed access to read only data such as programs, music etc..
If you would like a technical description or have a technical question send me a PM and I can get as technical as you want. I work for Symantec(formerly Veritas)as an Instructor and previously worked at Sun Microsystems as an Instructor. We can talk about "bus arbitration,disk rotational delay, disk caching behavior,cache size, seek times, disk thrashing behavior,and more.

hey, thanks! that's more info than what I could find online, so far. I'm going to keep looking into it; gives me something to do during the day instead of work... (I didn't say that...) That's the quickest definition of RAID I've seen, so far, and surprisingly, makes sense...

thanks again.

Is RAID on these SATA drives hardware or software configured? If hardware configured is it a separate or special controller? I have a computer here at my business that really should be at least mirrored but have been considering SCSI with RAID 5. This sounds like a lot less expensive and would let me sleep easier

Greetings,
The Software to do this on my box is Intel storage utility 4.5 . It requires setup prior to loading the OS (for the boot drive). So that would make it a part of the Firmware on the motherboard. Other drives can be reconfigured after OS load. Will do striping and mirroring. Striping is RAID 0. Mirroring is RAID 1. THere is no redundancy at RAID 0 but is can be used with RAID 1 on high end systems. RAID 5 is striping with parity and requires a minimum of 3 drives to implement. 2 for data stripes and one for a parity calculation. If any one drive fails the parity drive with a calculation can be used to recreate the missing data. RAID 5 is cheaper than RAID 1 because RAID 1 gives 50 percent utilization rate , where RAID5 gives greater than 50 percent because the redunancy is achieved by the addition of only one extra drive. If you have a business operation that has no redundancy, can you afford a total loss of all data? if not you should think about buying enterprise level software for data storage. These Enterprise level softwares allow for expanding sytem storage regardless of vendor.