[NewOldbie]

Well, I took the plunge and picked up a Quad. Moving up from a 17" 1GHZ G4 Powerbook.

I ordered stock 250 GB drive, and have 2 Hitachi 400GB SATA drives waiting here. My original intention was to pull the 250 stock drive and sell it to someone that may want it, or keep it as a backup drive.

Now the question is: If I run SoftRaid on the dual 400's (which I will mount inside the G5), will I see that much of a noticable speed increase?

I'll be working on some video editing, and will begin to play with Motion. (Most of my work to date has been with Photoshop and InDesign (print).

Your wisdom is appreciated.

[OreoCookie]

What RAID level do you want to run? 0 (= striping) or 1 (= mirroring).

With RAID0, you double your capacity, and you increase your throughput considerably (the amount of data you can transfer). If you work with lots of random accesses, something like a database, or maybe a music project with a great many instruments, you won't see almost any increase in speed, because the seek time is slightly worse than that of one drive.

Obviously, copying larger files (movies or many songs) will be faster. Make sure you have a backup strategy in case you go for a RAID0.

With a RAID1, you won't see any performance gains, the second drive mirrors the data in case one drive fails.

[NewOldbie]

I used to bail people out when their drives went down and they had no backup so I back up religiously. (Even on 400k disks!).

I will go RAID 0 for speed. In fact I am formatting and installing software on the other computer right now. Gonna be a fun Christmas for me this year.

I will also be picking up an extra drive for backup. Those 250s are a bit small now

Thanks!