Home Raider!

I am a sort of movie watcher that asks for original DVDs or VCDs whenever I rent movies. And I am also the kind that mostly watches those movies that are critically acclaimed in the Internet Movie Database and saves those movies onto my harddisk for viewing it till I am satisfied (read: bored) with it and have proudly screened them to my family. I guess I am the kind of user that's truly one of a kind :p

Now DVDs cost space (around 3.5 to 4.3 GB per movie, I recon). So I usually uninstalled those games that I play less frequently to make some space. After watching the movie to my heart's fullest, I normally either archive it by encoding it using those brilliant tools based on the DivX;) format or delete it depending upon the movie's ability to appease me.

Compressing a movie is a long, arduous process that I seldom mind to undertake unless the movie justifies itself for the time spent. Though tools of late could provide you support while you are groping in the dark trying to compress the movie, they can only help you as far as suggesting you the compressiblity of the movie; the actual size and resolution of the final movie is left for you to figure out. Tools like Dr.DivX can automate the entire process and certainly is suitable for almost all movies, but for a queer few movies, the resulting thing won't exactly please the senses.

So, after all these juggling with deleting and encoding which inevitably reduced quality, I've decided to buy a new hard disk for my computer. I am currently contemplating the possiblity of purchasing another Hard disk as my current 80GB Samsung Spin Point is full to the teeth with data. Since adding another disk to the ide channel might decrease performance, I have decided also to do a raid-0 on the two hard disks.

(Why Raid-0? Because it splits data into "Stripes" of some size, say 128KB, and then stores alternate stripes into alternate disks, hence almost doubling data read and write speeds. Infact, since there is no redundancy involved here, 'RAID-0' must be called just 'AID').

I was excited with this idea and so went to a computer shop to which I frequent. I swear that the guy got really panicky when I mentioned the word "Raid". (Which I presume is because of his stash of pirated game disks. Sometimes I get a feeling that these computer shops get real prfit only from selling these games than from selling anything with a hint of hardware in it.) So I trudged on to another "Computer shop" where I was told that raid cards cost around Rs.600 to Rs.1000 and that a hard disk similar to the one in my keep will cost me Rs.32oo. I thanked him and walked home. Operation "Home Raider" is finally assesed to be feasible and now all that I have to do is to wait till my exams get over, which it will do so on December 9th 2004.

But I wanted to know if that is the best I can do to my system. Then the thought of SATA hard disks hit me. But a quick visit to a few forums informed me that a Raid-0 is faster than a SATA, since a SATA hard disk is only mariginally faster than a equivalent IDE HDDs and so a Raid-0 of IDE HDDs must be performing much better than a SATA HDD.

But a visit to one particular site acted like a BSoD and brought my this endeavour to a crashing halt.
According to this site, for home users, the most that a RAID configuration can do is to waste the time you spent considering it. I claims that an ordinary home user can expect a performance increase of around 1 to 4% when comapared to a single hard disk. As an added bonus, you will also be reducing your hard disk's life by two, since even if a single hard disk fails, you lose your data entire!

But another site here, seems to tell me a completely different story. This site seems to take care of performance while gaming, movie encoding and that kinda stuff, so this test might be closer to what my requirement would be. And the disks actually show atleast 40% increase in performance there!

So, I have decided to bite the bullet and go for the raid configuration. Extra performance is not the bone of why I am buying another hard disk for and so any extra performance is only an added bonus than a prime factor in the final decision. I haven't yet finished the stage where I find out the max. speed vs max. perf. For example, I haven't looked into a SATA raid configuration yet ;) I am awaiting the end of semester exam days to continue pursuing my this raiding of hard disks.