I want to get a new hd and would like to use sata. I like to move my system disk to the new sata but don't know shit about raid. Can I just use 1 hd or do you need at least 2 and what raid#? All my mb will support is 0,1,jbod. If I need 2 hd, I'll just get 2, which I'm probaly going to do to get rid of some older ones that I have.I'm looking to get seagate x2. That is all the space I need for now unless shown better
Like I said before, I don't know shit about raid & sata so any info would be great

web server was no help

Whitestar unless your box has a SATA controller built in you will need to buy one of those too.

Raid works like this...

I can go into a deep discussion of raid if you would like, but for what you want I would suggest raid 1. You will need a raid controller to do a hardware raid, some pc's have the capability out of the box, check your manual or hardware configuration.

Raid 1 uses 2 disks of equal sizes to create a disk mirror.

Raid 5 uses 3 disks and adds striping and parity, this is usually a little slower than raid one and takes up more disks, I use Raid 5 for servers OS, then usually use an HBA card to connect to my storage if it is a file or app server.

PM me if you need any specifics since I don't check this forum that much.

My mb does have sata connectors on it and it does come up in the bios. Do I still need the controller?

Also if I get 320g hdx2 would I have 640g or just 320g because of the "mirroring"?

Your MB will support the drives, no controller needed unless you want to go higher that RAID 1.

You would have 320 GB.

Mirroring means you will have 2 identical drives. If one drive dies, you can reconfigure your RAID and use the remaining drive as a single drive.

I figured it would be at 320 because of the mirroring but just wanted to make sure. BUT I didn't know about you could have a single drive in raid. What raid # would that be Rocket? Raid 0 is the only one that I think would work. I really only need 1 drive to replace the old one with the os on it. It is a 50g and want to replace it before it goes to drive heaven with all my crap on it. But I probaly get 2 of them so I will have a backup.
Thanks for the help folks!

Bought 2 seagates. Now got to cross my fingers when it comes time to transfer os to the new drives.

You will be fine. I have been buying the new Seagate radial drives.
They are smoking fast, and in the graphics biz that is a huge time saver for 200 MB Photoshop files.

Unless you have imperical data that you just cannot absolutely do without, you do not need to do mirroring.

Sure, it's nice if you have if one of the drives die, you have an instant backup. However, now with the release of read/write blue ray dvd's. it's just not really needed.

When I ran my file server, I had 8 hdd's ran in a volume section. It ran for for 4 years without any problems.

Well installed both drives and had zero problems. I just did what Khan said and let them be single drives. The only bitch I have was when I migrated the master to the new sata. I had 2 partitions on it, 70/30 but it would not let me select the partition size before the install. No biggy, it all works great and thanks for the help

You can combine those partitions into one with something like Partition Magic.

Too lazy to find my copy of it.