Guidance on RAID 0 please.

[iTek]

Hi,

I know very little on Raid setups, I have read the sticky above and think its my next point of upgrade for my system.

I currently have two SATA drives in my machine a Maxtor and a Western Digital.

Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB SATA-II - WD6400AAKS
Maxtor DiamondMax 22 -500 GB - 300 MBps - 7200 rpm

My questions are... am I ok to proceed with buying an identical drive to the ones above or will they be too old or not upto the job of Raid.

Secondly I have a Asus P5Q Pro on windows 7, I assume the O.S comes with the drivers etc required.

Thirdly, can you partition on Raid?

Appreciate any help,
Gary

 

[dazzerd]

Hi there they will be up to the job but the blue from memory is a pretty slow drive.

You may want to get the 2xblack of 2xsamsung f3 if you have any extra cash. If not you could just but a another blue and raid them.

Your drives do not have to be identical so in practive you could raid 0 your maxtor and blue but I wouldn't. If you you use onboard or hardware array and the drives are of sifferent size you would loose some space. i.e. if you had a 500gb drive and a 640gb drive, your total size on raid 0 would be 1gb, 500gb x2 and you would not be able to access the extra 140gb. This however as far as I know not a limit using built in software raid on windows.

Finally you can partition a raid 0 array.

 

[iTek]

^ thats a good start thanks, I read you dont have to use same drives but you lose some space.

I suppose I it comes down to what the performace of 2xF3s (£80) will be over 1xWD Blue (£40) to complete my raid setup.

I think since its my first step into raid setup i'll stick with the WD Blue, it will save me some money.

Appreciate any further comments.