installing raid rivers

hk3948 · 16 Dec 2006 at 21:53

going raid 0. only thing is dont have a floppy drive. didnt think id ever use it for anything but this has proved me wrong. is there any other way of installing the raid drivers on windows install. mobo is evga 680i

rpstewart · 16 Dec 2006 at 22:11

Go find a piece of software called nLite, that will let you add the RAID drivers into a new XP install CD.

hk3948 · 17 Dec 2006 at 01:40

ok. the problem now is that on the evga site, the drivers come as a self extracting .exe that installs straight onto a floppy and nlite drivers can only be included as .inf files. what can i do now. thanks guys. appreciate the help

rpstewart · 17 Dec 2006 at 09:07

Do you have access to a USB pen drive? If you do you can mount it as drive a: and then the driver extraction program should work OK.

To get it onto a: you'll need to plug in the pen drive, go into Disk Management, find the entry for the pen drive, right click on it and then pick "Change Drive Letter". Hopefully "A" should be available if you don't have a floppy assigned to it.

hk3948 · 17 Dec 2006 at 12:00

good idea mate but didnt work. says "unable to determine floppy disk drive". any other ideas

rpstewart · 17 Dec 2006 at 12:22

OK, 2 options.

1) I managed to find a virtual floppy program which lets you create a RAM drive which behaves like a floppy. You can then extract the drivers to the RAM drive & copy them to wherever you need them.

Or 2) You can download a zip file of the drivers which I extracted using the above method to check it worked

. Zip file here

hk3948 · 17 Dec 2006 at 22:20

ok, gave up in the end and went and bought a god damn floppy drive from the high street. alright, just finished reinstalling windows and tried my best to setup a raid 0 config, however as is my first time im not sure if ive done this correctly. how can i check if my 2 samsung drives are in raid 0 configuration. they are 160gb drives each but my c drive is showing as 300gb. shouldnt it be 150ish if its in raid 0. sorry if im being thick, how can i check

rpstewart · 17 Dec 2006 at 22:41

If it's showing as 300 odd Gb then it's running as RAID0, the data is striped across both disks.

Were you wanting the data mirrored on both disks for redundancy? If so then you're really after RAID1.

hk3948 · 18 Dec 2006 at 01:06

no, i was after raid 0. have to be honest though. havent seen much of a change from when i wasnt in raid. thought id see a big difference. using hd tach, used to get average of 50mb/s and now getting 70ish. pretty crap isnt it?

rpstewart · 18 Dec 2006 at 09:08

That is a bit disappointing, I would have expected average reads to be higher than that, maybe 85-90Mb/s. You could try messing about with stripe sizes etc but that will mean reinstalling XP for each different stripe.

hk3948 · 18 Dec 2006 at 16:59

i dont understand why if 2 drives each of 160gb in size are put into raid 0 together that my c drive is showing up as 300gb not 150ish as in one drives worth, i thought raid 0 meant that exactly the same data existed on both drives