Raid striping w/unmatched drives (8 + 10 gig)?

[JEDI]

i'm tired of slow bootups.

i currently have a p3-700mhz w/a 10gig c: and 8gig d: drives. i plan to upgrade to a Athon XP w/a Raid mobo. to save on costs, i'm going to reuse the hard drives.

1) i know i can only have 16gigs on the stripe. Is there anyway i can use the other 2 gigs (like as a d: drive) or is it COMPLETELY wasted?

2) If i dont get a raid mobo, but instead do a software raid using w2k/xp, can i stripe the boot partition so i can have faster bootup?

THX

 

[JEDI]

bump

 

[Pariah]

Without going into detail, don't do it. If you want faster storage, you can get a 20GB Maxtor 7200RPM drive for $70, which is cheaper than a new MB w/ RAID, and a better option for more reasons than I care to cover here.

 

[socketman]

I agree with Pariah, dont do it. Those hard drives of yours are very old ( im guessing). RAIDing the two drives will make more space, but wont make bootup any faster. You need a faster HD for that. Like Pariah said, go with a 7,200 rpm for boot-up speed improvement.
If money is an issue, there are tweaks that may improve boot speed. But I dont remember any off the top of my head.
I would look further into raid before trying to partition. I recall that you cant have your OS on the same drive as your RAID drives. Ergo, ya need 3 drives to make a RAID. But i may be wrong.

 

[JEDI]

ah..thx

anyone know how many seconds faster will a w2k machine boot w/7200 rpm hd vs a 5400?

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Depends what the bottleneck in your system is. If it's twiddling its thumbs waiting for data, it's gonna make a big difference. If you're system is already getting data thrown at it as fast as it can handle, it will make little difference.

And striping on Win2K (and therefore XP, I assume) Is done on a per-drive basis, so you have to commit the entire drive to RAID.

There's an application called BootVis which optimises your PCs start-up routine. Some people have reported improvements of 30 seconds or more.

[edit] having re-read your original post, those two drives are going to be a large bottleneck for an athlon XP. Go for a decent 7200rpm drive