Storage Rig

[cy]

Hi guys,

I am looking for some suggestions as I haven't been following the hardware trend for a while.

I am looking to have 4x 250GB harddrive in it, that's the only requirement.

What would you guys suggest in terms of hardware wise? What's a good motherboard that would support 4 drives?

I currently have this machine and been great happy with it, whereever possible i would like to reuse some parts from here:
Pentium D 805 CPU
Foxconn Motherboard (http://www.foxconnchannel.com/Product/m ... -us0000166)
2x 512MB DDR ram
160GB PATA HD
DVD+/-RW
DVD+RW
ATI Radeon 9600Pro AGP
Diamond Xtreme 7.1 soundcard


What are the advantage and disadvantage of running both SATA and PATA drives in 1 rig?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Chris

[YARDofSTUF]

I would go with just sata drives, save the ide for CD/DVD roms

Whats the purpose of this rig, just storage?

Getting a new mobtherboard really means PCIe graphics, so a new card, and DDR2, so new ram.

If all you need is 4 drives I would get a PCI sata controller card and add it to your setup and plug the drives in.

[cy]

I would go with just sata drives, save the ide for CD/DVD roms

Whats the purpose of this rig, just storage?

Getting a new mobtherboard really means PCIe graphics, so a new card, and DDR2, so new ram.

If all you need is 4 drives I would get a PCI sata controller card and add it to your setup and plug the drives in.

That's what i thought about getting a new motherboard.

This rig is my main rig. I use it to do my daily surfing, some photoshopping, image editing, some slight programming. However I find that my space runs out quite quickly and there are things that i want to keep on HD instead of DVD - afterall I've lost too much data from DVDs. That's why I rather put tons of HD space in the rig instead of needing to burn them out frequently to free up space.

Does the PCI SATA controller slow things down? Will it allow SATA to perform 100%? How much do they run for?

Another concern I have is, All I have is a generic PSU, i am taking a wild guess that it's a 400W. Do I need an upgrade to power those 4 drives?

[YARDofSTUF]

Not sure on the power requirements, the sata controller would be fairly cheap, would run fine, no drive maxes out the 150MB/sec transfer speed.

[cy]

Thanks. I think that might sound like a good solution for me. I think it would make sense to upgrade the PSU as well.

Another question: If i add a card that support 2 SATA port, can i still run 2 other one off my other SATA port on the MB? Should i keep the system as is, or should i make the main drive as SATA and put away the PATA? Would that increase the overall system speed?

[YARDofSTUF]

Yeah you can still use the 2 on your mobo.

Probably would be a bit quicker loading things on the newer drives, especially liek teh new seagate 7200.10s, but nothing astounding.