New 3 disk raid, would you check for errors first?

Harbz · 30 Oct 2007 at 22:06

Just purchased 3x "SATA 250GB Seagate 7200.10 16MB" drives for a raid 0 setup. First time I will be running raid so I have some questions please!

* Would you slow format each drive first before setting up the raid to ensure there are no bad sectors?

* What is the best stripe size. the drive will be just used as a vista boot and apps drive, with a second partition on it to store music and videos. I will be using the onboard intel raid controller on my Gigabyte DS4 965 mobo.

Thanks!

Harbz · 30 Oct 2007 at 22:34

yep thats no problem. Not too concerned about the movies and music as most are backed up onto dvd anyway, I will do weekly ghosts of the OS partition.

Harbz · 31 Oct 2007 at 10:00

Thanks. I've been reading posts saying that the intel onboard controllers like 128k stripe size. Does that mean 128k is the best and fastest to use?

Harbz · 31 Oct 2007 at 11:06

Thanks for the replies, i went for the 250gig drives because they are the new single platter versions so they are the fastest around. 3 because i want faster vista boot speed. Is it possible to create 2 raid volumes on the same drives using half space each and different stripe sizes?

Harbz · 31 Oct 2007 at 12:05

Thanks. Would it be possible to leave some space on the disks as un-raided? So create a raid partition using the first 100gigs of space on the drives and the rest leave as normal drives?

Harbz · 31 Oct 2007 at 14:01

Omg, so i can have a raid0 array and a raid5 array on the same set of drives?

Harbz · 31 Oct 2007 at 19:12

awesome, thanks guys. Should be setting up a new 3 disk raid array of 250gig as raid0, and the remaining 500gig as a raid3 for my data.