Raiding properly/effectively - PROBLEM SOLVED!

[Research]

I tried to raid (0) my two hard drives (WD120 and MX120). The way I did it was going to disk management -> making the drives dynamic -> and combining the two drives as per microsoft directions . Even though the directions were for 2000, they seemed to be working fine in XP.

I could not see any information about the raid thing in my BIOS, .... maybe my mobo doesn't support it, or I don't know where to look! So do you think my raid is set-up without going into the bios? I can see my combined disk of 240 gig (120+120) in windows ..... but no mention in the bios! My raid card is simple an IDE software Raid Controller Card. The directions say that I would see the IDE raid thing in the bios, where I can repartition ...

Is there a way to test the whether my raid is properly working ... and its effeciency?

p.s.: Sometimes, while playing my TVO, I get an error in windows that data might have been lost in the drive (raided) due to hardware failure or network connection.

 

[ViRGE]

Your RAID setup is working, but what you've managed to accomplish is to use Win2K/XP's software RAID feature, where the OS chains together 2 hard drives. This is slow, CPU intensive, and downright ugly, so I'm doubting this is what you want. Check the manual for your RAID card, it will have instructions on how to load up the card's BIOS to set up your RAID set properly using the card.

 

[Research]

Thanks

I guess the problem was that my mobo had a stupid "Intel smart bios" enabled which would not let me enter the bios of my Silicon Image Raid card. This unsmart bios would skip the regular start-up features for fast booting. I wasted hours to figure this out. Finally, I played with the bios and turned this option off. I could see that during the boot-up I had an option to enter the bios of the raid card. From there, everything was simple. Now I have only one drive showing instead of two in windows. I went to disk management, and created just one volume (with no partitions), and then formatted the new drive. Now I have 120+120=240 gig of single drive for video editing. Everything looks fine now (I guess)