A prats guide to raid?

schnipps · 24 Mar 2010 at 18:28

Hi All, im quite well up on pc's and have just build a new rig but im a bit of a novice when it comes to raid setups. I have 1 500gig f3 drive now and wondered a few things.

1. Can i setup raid withouht reinstalling windows by buying another identical drive?
2. how much faster is raid over a single drive, is it worth it?
3. if the answer to 1 is yes how do it do it?

PatZ1989 · 25 Mar 2010 at 10:33

1. No
2. Depends on your array, striped worth it, mirror would be infact slower as its writing to two drives
3. no

immortalcloud · 25 Mar 2010 at 10:37

PatZ1989 said:
1. No
2. Depends on your array, striped worth it, mirror would be infact slower as its writing to two drives
3. no

I thought you could in windows 7 by goint to computer management?

master811 · 29 Mar 2010 at 16:25

immortalcloud said:
I thought you could in windows 7 by goint to computer management?

That is only Software raid, and will be slower than using the hardware raid built onto the motherboard.

Ziggy4 · 29 Mar 2010 at 16:39

Motherboard will be using firmware (host / fake / whatever you want to call it) RAID i.e. implemented through the BIOS and controller drivers. Hardware RAID is going to cost you a fair bit of money and not worth it in this case but yes, software RAID would be a very poor option. Advice to the OP would be to suck up a Windows re-install or restore from an image.