QUAD CORE ON 64-BIT PLATFORMS

Clarifications

I don't have articles handy, but I want to respond to your second question.

Is this a server you're asking about? If you're putting the money into purchasing a system with a quad-core proc and the performance of a 64-bit O/S, I would think you would also want a good disk system based on SCSI/SAS rather than IDE/SATA/PATA?

One good question to ask is why 64 bit?

But in general most chipsets that support quad cores also support 64 bit OSs so not an issue there.

You can have a RAID with almost any kind of drive, but you need a controller. Again some motherboards have a RAID controller built in, others you can buy a RAID controller card. I would tend to use SATA as opposed to IDE for RAID. With 2 drives you can do RAID O or RAID 1.

RAID 0 is striping - you spread your data over 2 drives and its faster. You are also twice as likely to lose data.

RAID 1 is mirroring - you write everything twice - once on each drive. This is slower but safer.

James