Installing Raid on vista.

Kozmo · 24 Jan 2007 at 01:35

Vista arrives tommorow, I have a Samsung 400mb spinpoint as my storage drive and 2x Raptor 74gb's in RAID 0. My mobo is 680i. I've never setup RAID or windows vista, can someone write a step by step guide please.

Also, do I need to create any partitions?

matja · 24 Jan 2007 at 18:25

Never used that particular board, but I did install Vista on my Intel onboard raid with no problems.

I did it by :

1) Go into mobo BIOS, enable RAID mode on the HD controllers (rather than IDE legacy or AHCI mode)
2) Enable RAID BIOS (sometimes called Int 19 hook)
3) Reboot
4) Enter the RAID BIOS via its special keyboard shortcut
5) Configure your disks how ever you want them. Most modern onboard RAID is pretty flexible about this, IE you could configure all your disks as one large RAID-0 array, or the first half of the disks as RAID-0 and the second half as RAID-1 (so you can have your OS/apps in RAID-0 for speed, and data on RAID-1 for safety)
Important to note that each array that you configure will become a seperate drive to the OS.
6) Boot Vista CD, either it will automatically detect the disks or you put your driver floppy/CD in, and Vista scans it for the RAID driver, and shows your arrays.
7) Partition (if you want) and install like normal
8) Remember to set in BIOS, the array you installed vista on to be bootable.

Kozmo · 24 Jan 2007 at 23:07

Thank you, does creating partition affect performance? I can create a partition at later date correct?

Do I need to lock sata ports?

Stripe and cluster size? I play a lot of the latest games. Some say that 16k is was better than 32kb, some say the opposite, help.

Kozmo · 24 Jan 2007 at 23:40

Please answer, all ready to try this experiment.

rpstewart · 25 Jan 2007 at 09:20

You will need to create at least one partition (to hold c

although you can create multiple ones (c:, d: etc) if you want. There is a school of though which suggests that by creating a small (30Gb or so) partition for c: at the start of the disk you can then ensure that Windows and all you programs etc are on the fastest part of the disk. You really need to decide before you start if you want to do this because if you only create a single partition filling the array at the start you'll need to use Partition Magic to create a second one and that can be a bit risky.

Not sure what you mean by locking SATA ports?

Stripe size is another tricky subject. Small stripe sizes will give good benchmark results but larger stripes can give better real world performance. Normally 32K or 64K are the recommendations.

matja · 25 Jan 2007 at 10:23

Ya, I configured my current RAID as a small 8GB RAID-0 logical drive for Windows XP to boot from and to keep my registry settings etc - I do this so I can image it and restore it very quickly from a bootable DVD. 50 GB RAID-0 for games and programs and temporary data, and some RAID-1 logical drives for my trusty Linux install with which I can fix Windows when it breaks, and my important documents/data.

Gets a bit complex when you want to take advantage of combining several array types on the same disks, but very worth it in my opinion.