SATA drives

[pit_viper_53]

Is a sata drive in a Raid array or IDE setting faster?

[EEVIAC]

Is a sata drive in a Raid array or IDE setting faster?

Please rephrase the question..Lol

[pit_viper_53]

Ok. I have a sata drive. In my bios I can set it to RAID or IDE. Which is faster (better).

[EEVIAC]

It should be noted first that SATA hard drives are different than IDE hard drives. Furthermore, RAID is simply an alternative way of setting up hard drive configuration, enabling higher speeds and/or data protection.  An IDE/RAID combo can be used or a SATA/RAID combo can be used.  It would help if you could post the make/model of your computer so I can look up your bios options and see what you are looking at..  Tampering with these options could cause your computer to not boot...

If you want speed increase, then using the RAID (level 0 at minimum) configuration would be the setting you need.  But in order for that to work you would need a second SATA drive connected to the motherboard.  Both drives would be used in parallel allowing faster data transfers.. Keep in mind that there are many RAID configurations ("levels") that can be used for this, however, the example I gave is just a quick explanation..  If you don't have a second sata drive then you should leave the option in the bios alone..


edit:  It should be noted that before deciding to implement RAID on a computer, that some versions of Windows don't support it.. 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

[pit_viper_53]

Ok this is what happened:
I was caught by the internet security 2010 malware.
To make a long story short I ended up having to format the boot drive and re-install XP. This was originally a Dell Dimension 2.8 ghz P4 with a factory SATA drive. I lost the motherboard and some of the other hardware to lightning. I took the box to a local computer guy and he put in a MSI motherboard and someother stuff to get it going again, the cpu and boot drive are the same. My restore disk is XP SP1. It wouldn't recognize the SATA drive, but, when I went in to the bios (I googled the problem and found this answer somewhere) and changed one of the peripheral settings to IDE from SATA it did see the drive and installed just fine. This is a WD 4500 SATA drive. It seems as fast or faster than ever. I know the clean install helped,but, I was wondering if changing back might make it faster. This is mostly just curiosity since I work on the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it and if it starts working quit working on it" plan.

[EEVIAC]

It seems strange that you are using an "IDE" setting to make your sata drive work and I'm not sure what you're talking about.  I need to know the model of the MSI motherboard you had installed, so I can find a description of its bios settings, to answer your question.. ..

It's possible that the tech. guy used an MSI board that doesn't support the 3G speed setting on  your sata drive, and you would have to use a jumper setting on the drive that utilizes the 1.5G setting... But still, I need to know the model of the board..