How to setup RAID0? Please Help...

[hongkongwong]

I have no clue how to setup a raid setup and I need some serious help. Please advise me of what I need and how to set it up. Any advice would be well appreciated. Thanks.

 

[konichiwa]

You should go buy a Fasttrack 66/100 card and buy two identical hard drives...and then read the manual!

 

[goldboyd]

if you're running nt/2k you can do it in disk administrator without any additional hardware.

 

[hongkongwong]

thanks...any additional help?

 

[pdo]

What other help do you need? Just connect the 2 drives to the Fastrak and then boot up, go in menus and specify which configuration. Reboot and then partition and format your drive just like you normally would.

 

[JackBurton]

I wouldn't recommend doing RAID 0 with IDE drives. Let me give you my experience with RAID 0 and my Promise FastTrak66 (no hack). I bought two BAND NEW 10GB Segate 7200RPM Barracudas and set them up as RAID 0, and after about a week or two one drive failed (all the data was lost but luckily I make buckups). Well I thought, it is probably just a bad drive. So then I oredered two identical BAND NEW 20GB 7200RPM IBM drives with 2MB cache (4MB in total after set up as RAID 0). Guess what, after about one or two weeks one drive failed (lost the data on them AGAIN)! Both time I had to return the drives because it wouldn't FDISK! And this was on a system that the PCI was running at its standard speed of 33MHz, so overclocking didn't kill the drives. All I can tell you is, the reason I went with RAID 0 is because I wanted the HD performance without the SCSI price. Well looking back, I should have gone the SCSI route, it would have cost me about the same! I would ONLY recommend doing RAID 0 or 5 on SCSI drives because I just don't think the IDE drives can hack it.

As for doing RAID 0 on NT/2000, you can't do RAID 0 on your boot partition. Also, hardware is ALWAYS the best way to do RAID. Doing RAID 0 on 2000 is going to eat up much needed resources. Damn, I have 2000 Server at home just running Active Directory, Proxy 2.0 and with 128MB of ram it did a memory dump TWICE and KILLED Active Directory both time, and I had to reinstall! now I have 384MB and everything is fine.

 

[pdo]

I guess I'm pretty luck then. Been running a hacked Fastrak on an overclock PCI bus and never have any problems. Maybe it's your card that's giving problems Jack.

 

[JackBurton]

There could be ONLY two probelms, a bad RAID card or RAID 0 is not good for IDE drives. I'm going for the second theory because I don't want to waste anymore money on HDs trying to see which theory is right. I've narrowed it down to two theories and that is good enough for me.

.paldo, how long have you been running your HDs in RAID 0? I also would HIGHLY recommend that you back you data up too, but I'm sure you already do that.

I just wanted to share my experience with IDE drives configure to run at RAID 0, because I don't want people to go through what I did. Damn I was pissed! The second time one of my HDs crashed I was about to kick the crap out of my box!