jaybird wrote:My question is should I just slave it off the 20 gig or should I use RAID?
I assume you are talking about striping (RAID 0). If that is the case then you can only use the capacity on both drives that is the same as the capacity of the smaller drive. You will also double your chances of messing up your system in a disk crash since your RAID container will break completely if one of the drives break. Also, I am not sure about the performance increase you get from striped disks when storing many small files which is what the OS consists of. I haven't tried this myself but I would think that it is a bad idea. Striping disks is a good idea when you mess around with video editing that create large files and so on.
jaybird wrote:and if I do, should I attempt WIN2K Pro software RAID?
Why not? I have seen tests where Linux software RAID beats expensive hardware RAID kits. I have also seen recommendations on not using certain hardware RAID kits at all, but instead setting up the disks as independent drives for Linux to tie into a RAID configuration. I have no idea about Windows Software RAID thoughh. Linux software RAID is well documented and tested on several different places around the web.
jaybird wrote:I've heard that it works well, is easy to do but you take more of a "hit" on the CPU's than if you use hardware raid.
Don't read too much into that. If you are using DMA then running two disks separately won't take much more CPU than running those two disks in a striped configuration. In Linux anyway. I can't be bothered with Windows
jaybird wrote:OBTW, trying to breath life back into my V.40 board, upon closer look I found cold and loose solder joints on the EC10. Also very strange, when I removed EC10 to clean up holes and resolder I found a SECOND hole on the "-" side of the EC10 mounting holes in the board? Very strange!
Not strange at all. This is because the manufacturer wanted to specify two different caps that had a difference in length between the two wires. It is pretty common practice to safeguard yourself if you think running one specific cap (or any other component for that matter) might give you trouble down the road.