2 hard drives - raid 0 ..help

karlos103 · 7 Jun 2009 at 17:52

Hi all

Never done raid setup before so very new to this .

What are the benefits of having Raid 0 setup ? how much of a difference in speed would there be like loading windows vista 64bit or playing games etc?

Im thinking of running 2 Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD6401AALS) in Raid 0 configuration on a Gigabyte GA-EX-58-UD5 motherboard

Also is it easy to setup and would i have to completely wipe the system and start from scratch ? already have windows vista and xp installed dual booting ...only installed 2 weeks back so not major problem if needs wiping .

Any help most appreciated
Karl

siege2 · 7 Jun 2009 at 18:06

Hi I'am now running my 2 320gb HD on my i7 setup, same setup as u , there have being in stalled on another 2 systems before that, do the setup off Raid on boot up hold down 2 keys to get into the configuration menu "ITS easy", also if you have both vista and xp installed on one hd now use a cloning program for your HD, I use acronis make a boot cd then follow the options, I am not on main PC atm down my sisters on there network using my eeepc :-)

so I'am sorry if I cannot give you more positive results to your questions.

karlos103 · 7 Jun 2009 at 18:20

well i dont mind re-installing from scratch ...prob get rid of xp as dont really need it now .
Probably the easiest route ...will be nice and clean then with no errors .
So what are the benefits ? speed wise ?
I guess i will have to backup stuff regularly or just put stuff onto another hard drive that i dont need to access often ..ie pictures etc .
thanks

siege2 · 7 Jun 2009 at 22:05

yes speed wise you can see my results for both my hd's much better than singular,
in a few months I'am going for ssd HD's , def want to raid them .
but like you have said dont keep data on main raid boot up add 2 more hds then set them up as raid 1. one hard drive fails then take it out , put new one in then the data is mirrored to both :-)

get 2 500gb for data only ect..

karlos103 · 8 Jun 2009 at 15:51

yes im going to raid 0.... 2 640gb western digital drives and then just backup data often to a 1.5tb drive .....prob best route to take

siege2 · 8 Jun 2009 at 17:52

2 raid 0 at 640gb is 1.2+ tb main boot up , could you say get 2 smaller ones then use them, keeping the bigger drives for storage.

FaceplantSi · 8 Jun 2009 at 17:57

I agree that it would be better to have 2 smaller drives as a RAID 0 boot array for OS & Apps and then a larger drive for storage. You can also keep an image of the boot array on the storage drive and that way if the array ever fails you have an image to reload from.

karlos103 · 8 Jun 2009 at 20:46

i have 5 drives all together , so 2 640gb drives is not a major issue ....those are the only 2 matching drives .
also have another 640gig drive ( different make )and a 320gig drive plus my 1.5tb drive ...so backup space is not an issue lol