Raid Problems

[foodfightr]

I just purchased a second identical hard drive and I'm trying to install windows on a raid 0 array. In my bios I've enabled raid and selected the two sata ports with the drives I'd like to configure. Then, I rebooted and entered the raid options and set the two drives to striping. When I boot from my disc drive to the vista 32bit installation, it still sees the two drives as seperate drives. I downloaded the nforce4 vista 32bit drivers from here. I found a folder called sataraid, which I copied to a floppy. I loaded the driver off of the floppy, still no luck.

Originally this post was about windows vista, I just tried to install windows XP and I'm getting the same thing.

 

[Roguestar]

I think the best help I can give is twofold: persuading you not to use RAID-0 and pointing you to someone who can actually help.

1)

Originally posted by: AnandTech review
The results speak for themselves with the RAID 0 setups offering extremely minor performance improvements in actual game load testing.

we could not tell any differences during actual game play with a RAID 0 setup when compared to the singel drive setup.

Without a benchmark, these differences are impossible to witness during actual game play.

We see about 2% difference in this game on the initial load screen and throughout testing we could not tell the difference between RAID 0 and a single drive. Once again, a slight difference but nothing near the differences in our synthetic tests.

We see a 2%~3% difference between our RAID 0 and single drive configurations in this benchmark with no noticeable advantage being noticed during gameplay.

All of those results sound very impressive but in the balance of our application and game tests we only noticed a 2%~3% performance difference between RAID 0 and single drive configurations. Unless you extract files, copy or move them on the same drive, and encode all day long then the benefits of RAID 0 on the typical consumer desktop is not worth the price of admission.

RAID 0 can provide some impressive performance results in synthetic benchmarks and certain applications that are write speed starved as we have shown. In fact, with the new test bed the test results where RAID 0 shines are even more impressive now. However, we still do not think RAID 0 is worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer, especially with the software RAID capabilities included on most motherboards. If you must run RAID on the desktop, then we highly recommend the use of RAID 1, 5, or 10 (0+1) in order to protect your data and probably a hardware controller if you can afford one.

At this time we still do not recommend RAID 0 for most desktop users due to the lack of widespread performance improvements and potential data integrity concerns with it.

2) http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=32

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: foodfightr
When I boot from my disc drive to the vista 32bit installation, it still sees the two drives as seperate drives.

I'm a little confused by that statement.
Are you booting from one of your HDDs or from the Vista install disk?
You should be booting from the Vista install disk. Set the BIOS to boot from your optical drive.
Note: A vista install with a reformat will send everything on the drives to bit heaven.

It would help to know what MOBO you have.

 

[Ryland]

You need to install the SATA_IDE driver before installing the SATA_RAID driver.

 

[foodfightr]

Originally posted by: Ryland
You need to install the SATA_IDE driver before installing the SATA_RAID driver.

How can I install a driver when I can't boot the os though?

I was able to reformat the two hard drives as one raid 0 array. I installed the image backup of windows vista I had made. It won't load as it hangs on crcdisk.sys. I'm sure this is most likely because it doesnt know to load the raid driver as the image was made before the raid configuration.

MOBO: LanParty Ultra-D
HDDS: 2x Raptor 150gb