RAID Newbie

[dr0be]

I've always wanted to set up a RAID in my system but never gotten enough interest in the subject. Since I'm doing a full-wipe in the next week or 2 when my Windows 7 64bit disk comes I was thinking about buying a 2nd model of my hard drive and running RAID...only problem is, I know nothing about it...

What RAID to use, if my mobo easily supports it, how to set it up from a clean wipe, programs?, drivers?, if the hard drives I use are suitable, etc etc.

So, is there any good guides anyone knows of I can learn a bit about it? Or just some tips?

2nd hard drive I'd be buying
Current Mobo: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 Rev2.0

Thanks in advance!

 

[Blain]

Buy 3 WD 640GB Black drives and set up a RAID 5 array.
If you're locked into the smaller WD Blue drives, go for RAID 0 IF you are religious about your backup routine.
Go with a RAID 1 is you're sloppy on a backup routine.

To be honest, you should simply buy a single WD Black 1TB or Samsung F3 1TB and run a non-RAID setup.

 

[Madwand1]

If you're just mucking around trying RAID, you're far better off not installing the OS under RAID and instead installing it on some other drives. Tying the OS to RAID prevents you from changing the RAID configuration without risking / wiping the OS.

To install the RAID drivers, you need RAID enabled at the BIOS level. But if you have RAID enabled at the BIOS level, the OS can't recognize the drives, so you can't install it. This is kind of a catch-22, with the solution being to extract the RAID driver "floppy" images, and provide them to the OS during installation.

As your motherboard has 2 independent SATA controllers, I'd instead recommend connecting your OS drive to the Gigabyte controller in IDE mode, enabling RAID but not configuring it on the Intel controller, and installing the OS as normal -- without RAID or additional drivers.

Then you can install the RAID software under Windows and set up and alter RAID from Windows. You can even switch the OS drive back to the Intel controller if you want at this point.