Is a RAID drive faster than a IDE and now much?

First off, is a SATA the same as saying RAID? I dont seem to see any RAID drives for sale but I see a lot of SATA (Serial ATA).

Would a RAID/SATA be good for a new system. I know one difference with the RAID over the IDE is a much smaller slimmer plug/wire. Less chance of a massive ribbion cable blocking the air flow or getting into a fan or something.

No SATA is not the same as RAID. SATA,IDE or SCSIare the drives interface.How they connect and communicate with the motherboard etc..

RAID is a configuration of the drives, so for example you have 2x 100GBSATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration (striped). This means they are logically seen asone drive,so the PC thinks you haveone drive at 200GB, even though physically you havetwo drives. There is no fault tolerance with this though so ifone drive fails you could lose everything. A program / operating system could spanboth drives.

Another common option is RAID 1 (Mirrored) with this configuration your PC will see your 2x 100GB SATA drives as1 x 100GB SATA drive, but it will copy all data onto the second drive. This option gives a backup and fault tolerance. So if one drives fail you can still carry on working. You will then be able to replace the failed drive and rebuild the mirror.

Both options will give you a performance increase as well as both disks can be read/written too at he same time.

There are many other levels of RAID which will give you varying performance boosts and fault tolerance depending on the number of drives you have in your machine.

I would recommend reading up on the subject before you make your choice but i hope this clarifies a few points for you.

RAID 1 creates a Performance DEcrease, not increase. RAID 0, if the files are large enough (think video editing), speeds up file management copying, saving, loading. However, game files are smaller than that, and extensive tests several years ago by the lab gurus at AnandTech with a broad range of games and drive systems proved RAID 0 not only didn't help game players, it added a slight bit of overhead that ended up slightly decreasing performance !

The differences between PATA and SATA are small, but favor SATA on all size files, and there have been few onboard PATA RAID systems, so any perceived RAID 0 advantage is probably actually just the difference that SATA makes, instead.

IDE is ATA. ATA has Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA). The old IDE drives are PATA.

RAID is not a type of drive, but it is an array of harddrives working together. RAID is primarily meant to protect data from hard drive failure by using multiple similar drives in special ways.

As far as performance, that can be disputed. The question for using RAID is if you have sensitive data that you can't afford to lose.