Raid question

[The Belgain]

I have an Iwill XP-333R mobo which has 2 normal IDE channels and 2 Raid channels. At the moment I have my devices connected like this:

IDE channel 0: CD writer as master
IDE channel 1: DVD drive as master, another CD writer as slave

Raid channel 0: 30 gig Seagate
Raid channel 1: 40 gig maxtor

I am thinking of buying 2 80gig drives and stripe raiding them. How would i connect them? If i put them as master on raid channels 0 + 1 respectively, would the other two drives which would be slaves slow them down? Should i put the two raided disks on the same channel?

Also, the new WD drive with 8 MB buffer has had some really good reviews; what will having a large buffer improve performancewise (ie sustained transfer rates, gaming, simultaneous read/writes)?

[SpEeDaMiGo]

¡Hola RAID cumpañero!
It ain't an optimal number of drives you got in your configuration. Optimal would be ONE drive per channel, but since you got 7 drives it won't be an easy task ...
Concerning your RAID 0 I'd put those new HDs as masters on two SEPARATE channels (i.e. one primary raid master and one secondary raid master). Like this you'll get optimal performance when accessing your raid array. However when you access one of the other two HDs at the same time as the raid array you'll loose performance since IDE can only access one drive per channel simultaneously (you see, the two raid HDs on the same channel would be idiotic). That's the price you've got to take with your config, however I think your raid array will be your "primary harddisk space" and your other two HDs merely for backup, thus it won't be such a high one to pay. If you could get rid of one of those other ATA drives you would have 2 free channels for your two RAID hds.
Hope this helped a little.

Hasta luego :cool: