SATA RAID difficulty?

[CJP]

How much more difficult is it to set up SATA RAID 0 than just having 1 drive? I've read about people putting two of those fast Raptor drives in RAID and alot of new motherboards seem to have it built in but is there much to it?

 

[Zelmo3]

When I got my Promise controller card, I was impressed with how easy it was to set up. It was just a matter of plugging in the hardware, booting, and after the mobo's BIOS got ready to boot, the RAID controller's BIOS loaded and prompted me to pick what kind of array to use.
A clean OS install is then as easy as with a single drive; you can create a mirror array without destroying the data on your existing drive, but making a stripe array requires formatting both drives together (the OS handles this as formatting one big drive).

 

[CJP]

From what you say I think a stripe array is what I'd be interesed in (that's raid 0 right?). I'd want both drives to function as a single drive to the OS. When your motherboard has built in RAID do you have to load special drivers and is it a hassle to get them loaded right?

 

[billyjak]

Raid 0 is correct, you set up your raid array when the computer boots up by pressing ctrl I or whatever your sata is.
You specify the array stripe such as 0 or 1 or 0+1. Raid 0=speed, 2 drives acting as one. Then you choose the stripe size such as 16k, 32k, 64k, or 128k then exit after your done.
Have a floppy ready with the sata drivers on it when rebooting,windows disk and floppy in the computer, have your bios boot to CDRom, windows starts to load and will ask for a 3rd party driver, that's where you hit F6 to load the sata drivers. Have the floppy in the drive and leave it there until windows loads because it will search for the floppy during install. That's it it's really very simple.

 

[CJP]

Originally posted by: billyjak
Raid 0 is correct, you set up your raid array when the computer boots up by pressing ctrl I or whatever your sata is.
You specify the array stripe such as 0 or 1 or 0+1. Raid 0=speed, 2 drives acting as one. Then you choose the stripe size such as 16k, 32k, 64k, or 128k then exit after your done.
Have a floppy ready with the sata drivers on it when rebooting,windows disk and floppy in the computer, have your bios boot to CDRom, windows starts to load and will ask for a 3rd party driver, that's where you hit F6 to load the sata drivers. Have the floppy in the drive and leave it there until windows loads because it will search for the floppy during install. That's it it's really very simple.

Thanks for running through that Billyjak. That doesn't sound too complicated so maybe I'll give it a shot. What stripe size do most people use?

I just priced those Raptor drives. I didn't realize they were that expensive. I'd still get a decent speed boost with two 7200rpm drives set up for RAID 0 wouldn't I?