OLD PC Upgrade .. RAID ???

[dumbalien]

Hello,

I have an old Dell pc that has P4 with 256mb ram, 32mb nvidia geforce, and 1x20 gig + 1x 40gig hardirves.

I am considering upgrading the ram to max possible and wondered if i should look at the PCI RAID Card route with 2 new hardrives.

Would this help in improving performance or should i just get a PCI SATA card ?

Hope someone can help.

[Warpnow]

The raid is unlikely to improve performance.

I'd upgrade the ram first thing.

[bullgr]

hi...

first of all your pc is not old (in linux world an old pc is a simple, plain pentium 1 or at least pentium 2).
for better performance upgrade your ram to 1gb and change the harddrives with new ones with 8 mb cache and 7200 rpm (theres not really neccesary to be the hd sata).

this is only you can do to increase the performance of your pc...

[nhydra]

If you will get RAID you should know that RAID controllers for less than $500 are just IDE/STA cards with poor software RAID drivers. So, just look for some cheap IDE/SATA card and use the MD linux driver. It is very optimized and has very good performance. If you need a small server or powerful workstation i suggest RAID 0 for maximum write and read performance. Look for good drives because if someone fails .... you loose tha data on both . HITACHI have good models now.

[Ringi]

It is a fine computer, just add 256mb ram, I would add 1 gb. P4 works fine with linux. I have Targa labtop (year 2000) with 64 mb ram and 6 gb Hd. First I tried to install ubuntu, it did not even start on life disk, but it worked with Redhat 7.1 , Mandrake 8.1 and Puppy linux.

[Rocket2DMn]

Agreed, RAID won't do much for you. Upgrade your RAM, and maybe your video card if you plan on using graphics intensive apps.
If you are worried about HD speed, then SATA is a good way to go, but there is no point in investing in a SATA card if an IDE hard drive will work fine, you can get large ones for pretty cheap nowadays.

[madmetal]

ram is a crucial upgrade..
my old laptop has an 600Mhz celeron but with 512 ram runs ubuntu fine...