Olaf van der Spek

And you're sure the cause is the CPU? A faster X2 is the best option, given that you'll unlikely benefit from more than 2 cores.

A redundant array could become inconsistent, a non-redundant one can't.

I tried to install XP SP2 on the second drive in my system, but during the install, after it reboots for the first time, I get the error message "Error loading operating system". The XP SP2 on the first drive also fails to boot now. Trying a Windows 2003 install results in the same error. Does anyone know how to solve this? Fixboot and fixmbr don't seem to do anything. System: Core 2 Duo E6600 2 gb RAM 2x 320 gb SATA HDD Asus P5B.

What makes you think that's an IRQ issue? Sounds more like a memory issue to me. There's not enough space left to copy the (boot) ROM of the controller I guess. This should only be required for booting though, after that it should work.

750 euro for a PC? Don't you have a new one for 450? Why would you have to buy Office again? You can just reinstall if you've already got a license. Or use OpenOffice. None of these cards allows you to play recent games at decent quality, so asking for the least bad solution it'll probably be the 6200. Why don't you try to find benchmarks?

Isn't there a 7k200 already?

If you need capacity, it's far cheaper to buy 3x 500 gb 3.5" HDDs. It's probably faster as well.

If the HDD returns wrong data without error, the RAID controller will probably accept that, even if it's a hardware controller. How is the controller supposed to know the data is wrong if the HDD says it's right? Is this about PATA or SATA BTW?

Maybe he meant for the same performance. Or maybe you can use a less expensive controller. If you have 4 disks and a stripe size of 64 kbyte and you do a 192 kb aligned write, all 4 disks will do a single write.

Often, CRC errors are simply indicative of a bad cable or improper cabling. Check your cable. From Wikipedia: UltraDMA CRC Error Count -- The number of errors in data transfer via the interface cable as determined by ICRC (Interface Cyclic Redundancy Check). That's about PATA, not SATA. Right, but the first post was about a Windows/(software?) error message, not a SMART counter. Who's talking about SMART counters? Looks like a Windows error message.

At least 6? Where does the 6 come from? 4x 2 gb sounds more logical. What do you need 12 gb of virtual memory for? 25 - 30 minutes loading? How big is it? That sounds very, very long.

What would be considered a "large write"? What file sizes are we talking about here? Stripe size * (N - 1). If aligned, RAID 5 doesn't have to do any extra reads and just a single extra write.

Only if you write partial stripes. For large writes RAID 5 could be faster. If SATA performance is good enough, go SATA.

Sounds like a bad RAID controller.

Or keep your single work drive and use RAID5 with manual backups from the work drive to the RAID array. Then performance of the array isn't important anymore.