RAID 0 help - from start to finish?

[slackerinabox]

Hey guys, I'm setting up my new system this week and have some concerns about my raid 0 setting (2x40gb western digital drives)... I want them to be bootlable with my 80 gig hd on a regular, non raid channel as a data/ file dumping drive.. Here's are my questions (and thanks SO much for the help):

1) I'm currently using the two drives as standard IDE drives - should I just format the drives or erase ALL partition information from them before adding them to an array?

2) When setting up windows I've heard that it's better to split up the drives into smaller partitions instead of one big (in this case 80 gb) partition- does this apply to RAID arrays too? If so, what's the ideal config (4x20 gig partitions,etc.)

3) Windows requires that you apply raid drivers before installing windows ("HIT F6 TO LOAD DRIVERS") - is there a way to do this without a floppy drive? I could always crap my dad's drive but still....

4) Does having a raid drastically increase CPU/resources usage? I'm using a PCI based (silicon image or something like that) card - does the resources that RAID uses negate any performance gain?

5) Do I sound like a total idiot or just an ignorant newbie?

Seriously though, thank you guys for all the help and be well!

 

[Jeff7]

1) The RAID setup utility will wipe out anything on the drives when it configures them as an array - you needn't format them. Once they are configured as a RAID array, they will be seen as a single drive, which will then be partitioned and formatted anyway.

2) Can't help much here; I haven't ever done partitioning. I just organize things with directories prrmarily.

3) Can't help here either; I've still not left the floppy drive behind. It just comes in really handy too many times to get rid of it. That, and I've got a few hundred good floppy disks that my dad rescued from the trash from the TRASH at the company he works at. (Program disks for that matter!) So dammit, I'm going to use them.

4) Not that I've noticed. If anything, the system's running faster. I do video editing on my secondary computer - it's the one with the RAID 0 array - and it does hard drive intensive activities much faster now. Encoding the video didn't speed up of course, as that's processor/RAM dependent.

5) Smile and nod, slowly back away... I didn't know much about RAID until maybe a few months ago either. I knew it could be used for mirroring, striping, or both, but that was really it. But I figured it would help with video editing - when the computer's reading around a 5-12GB file, it helps to have a speedy hard drive, or an array of them.

Another tip I've seen recommended is to put each drive in the RAID array on its own channel - one on the primary RAID IDE connector, one on the secondary. It's the way IDE works, that it can't issue more than one data request at a time on each channel, or something like that. Putting each drive on its own channel lets the RAID controller talk to the individual drives faster.