Can a newbie use RAID 0?

[Denis54]

I am an average user who has never used RAID 0 before.

I want to build a new system with P4P800 DX, P4 2.8 Ghz, 512 mb memory, ATI 9600 Pro. I have not decided yet on which hard drive I will get. RAID 0 sounds attractive as I understand that 2 drives in RAID 0 are much faster than a single drive.

What are the steps I will have to go through to start using RAID 0? Is there any web site I can consult to find out what needs to be done.

I have never done this before nor do I have access to any local resources that can guide me about this.

 

[MDE]

It's pretty easy. There should be instructions with your motherboard or RAID card that explain the process, but I'll try my best.

1) Hook up the drives
2) Boot up and enter the RAID setup, tell it to format the drives if needed and create a RAID0 or stripe set (same thing)
3) Boot off Windows CD, press F6 when it says "Press F6 to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" and install the driver
4) Install Windows
5) Shut down, Plug in any IDE hard drives (otherwise the IDE drive will be called C instead of the RAID set)
You may have to set the BIOS to boot off SCSI if there isn't an option for Serial ATA or RAID.

It might sound complicated, but it's pretty simple once you go through it.

 

[RollWave]

i got raid and I'm new to SATA as well as raids but mine is up and running great!

 

[EeyoreX]

Anyone can use RAID, it's generally very easy to set up. However, before you become trapped into the generalization that RAID 0 is "much faster" than a single hard drive, you need to evaluate what you are doing. If you are sticking to fairly typical desktop applications, like internet, Word, email, and gaming, RAID 0 will not offer too much performance boost. If you are doing things like video editing and encoding, or servering databases, then RAID 0 will really do more for you.

\Dan

 

[axemanxt40]

Hey I got that motherboard and I am a newbie to building computers myself...although I am very familiar with the hardware and such putting it all together was a first for me.

And I think that RAID 0 is very easy to configure, and the only challenge would be is if you dont have a floppy drive like me, and you need to load the 3rd party RAID driver during the windows install. Overall I would say that the motherboard you got a very easy to work with, and its got some great features. I like mine a lot, if you got any questions more directly on the specific motherboard/setting up anything on it, feel free to ask me!

 

[beatle]

RAID 0 won't really help in video encoding unless it requires a lot of disk writing. Most people encode video very slowly because it is CPU bound, not disk bound. Editing can be a different story, but if I'm multiplexin/demultiplexing something, I would rather have the 2 drives on their own channels so I'm reading from one and writing to the other. I'm not sure about database performance, but I have a feeling that a single SCSI drive would be faster than an IDE/SATA RAID 0 setup due to seek times and command reordering.

 

[StraightPipe]

if it's your first box, i'd recomend leaving the raid out, just boot one IDE drive. once it's good then throw in the RAID, and start it off.

 

[Blackroot]

sorry for the newbie question, but what does/is raid0 compared to SATA or whatever normal HD's use?

 

[Sheriff]

RAID benefits from applications and access of programs and benefits very little for storage use. Theroerically it's supposed to be twice as fast as a single HD, when using the same, but a user will see maybe a 30% increase with certain apps.