[l008com]

--PowerMac Dual 533 10.1.3 640MB RAM--
I currently have the default 40GB Hard drive and an old 4 GB IDE drive in my Mac. Both are pretty full. I Plan on upgrading. I basically am considering two options.
1) An IDE RAID
Buy 3 big 120GB 7200RPM IDE drives, and a PCI IDE Card. Then use SoftRAID to turn them into one BIG FAST volume. Each of the 3 drive would be on its own bus so each would be read from and written to at the same time.
2) A SCSI RAID
Buy 3 big 36 GB 7200RPM SCSI drives, and a PCI SCSI Card. Then use SoftRAID to turn them into one big VERY fast and high performing volume.
SoftRAID isn't out yet for OS X but it is supposed to be soon, and when it is is is supposed to work on IDE and SCSI, and be bootable. No matter what I am going to wait until it comes out to proceed. Now we're looking at a 105GB drive vs a 360GB drive. Both of these options cost about the same. Of coarse I'd much rather have 360GBs but the deciding factor is performance. I'm wondering how the performance of these two RAID would be, compared to each other, and compared to the stock single IDE drive. I am very demanding on my drives now, so the high performance of a SCSI RAID would not go to waste in my Mac. I just need to see how the performance is relative to each other before I draw the line and choose which is right for me.

[jcadam]

Originally posted by l008com:
<STRONG>--PowerMac Dual 533 10.1.3 640MB RAM--
I currently have the default 40GB Hard drive and an old 4 GB IDE drive in my Mac. Both are pretty full. I Plan on upgrading. I basically am considering two options.
1) An IDE RAID
Buy 3 big 120GB 7200RPM IDE drives, and a PCI IDE Card. Then use SoftRAID to turn them into one BIG FAST volume. Each of the 3 drive would be on its own bus so each would be read from and written to at the same time.
2) A SCSI RAID
Buy 3 big 36 GB 7200RPM SCSI drives, and a PCI SCSI Card. Then use SoftRAID to turn them into one big VERY fast and high performing volume.
SoftRAID isn't out yet for OS X but it is supposed to be soon, and when it is is is supposed to work on IDE and SCSI, and be bootable. No matter what I am going to wait until it comes out to proceed. Now we're looking at a 105GB drive vs a 360GB drive. Both of these options cost about the same. Of coarse I'd much rather have 360GBs but the deciding factor is performance. I'm wondering how the performance of these two RAID would be, compared to each other, and compared to the stock single IDE drive. I am very demanding on my drives now, so the high performance of a SCSI RAID would not go to waste in my Mac. I just need to see how the performance is relative to each other before I draw the line and choose which is right for me.</STRONG>

If you've got the money for 3 big SCSI drives, you probably have the money for a HARDWARE RAID controller, which would give you better performance.
Hardware RAID controllers for IDE are out there too.........

SCSI is better if you like to read from and write to multiple drives at the same time (IDE sucks at this, but is about as fast as SCSI in single-drive applications).

[l008com]

I do not have the money for three big SCSI drives AND a hardware SCSI RAID card. Plus I don't think there is one compatible with X right now anyway.
As far as IDE RAID Cards... IDE can still only write to one drive on a bus as a time, So I don't see how one of those cards could give any performance boost. have 3 different IDE busses will give me three different streams of i/o. Basically, I know how it all works, I just wanna know some real world statistic. How will the performance of these different setups be in the end. If the IDE RAID wil increase performance enough, I'll go with it for the extra space, If it really doesn't but the SCSI raid make the performance 10X faster, I'll go with it and screw the space, and hope i'm not full again in a year.

[l008com]

Does anyone with actual knowledge/experience on the subject wanna chime in?

[Eriamjh]

Getting RAID advice on this forum is difficult. I have tried. There just ins't enough people doing it.