[Shacs] sata raid for winxp

[Bronius Motekaitis]

I need a little tech talk..  It's been a while since I opened a pc, and lo
and behold, my wife's Dell has a sata drive-- talk about a fortuitous step
in the right direction some years ago...

So.  I'd like to put a pair of 500GB western digital drives in mirrored
raid-1 config on this Dell Dimension 4700 running winxp.  It's got two sata
ports hanging off the motherboard, but I can't tell whether the
motherboard/bios will support raid natively.

Supposing it cannot, I am checking out this PNY PCI card.  And came across
the same in PCI-express...  ok, so I don't know whether I have a free PCIe
slot:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/techov.htm
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/specs.htm
Neither the video (PCI-E x16) nor the little rinky-dink PCI-E x1 have
anything in them, but which am I looking to fill with the PNY sata raid
card?

And (perhaps out of order), am I going to expect a huge hd r/w performance
hit by running thru a pci-e vs my onboard sata?

Side note, because you made it this far: Who ever thought the day would come
that consumers could buy TERABYTE drives for their home PCs!  I know Burris
didn't..  yes, Dr. B, that's a *Lot *of reel-to-reel cassettes.

please help. . Got a baby due in 1-2weeks and need to free up some digital
storage space quickly.. :O
-bronius
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