Setting up RAID0

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
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Hey guys :D

For years now I've always fancied playing with RAID for the extra performance and because hey - we are geeks, and playing with stuff like this is fun, right?

So thats it - I now have 2 WD Caviar Black 750Gb drives (Second one has just turned up as a gift from somebody who knew I'd always been tempted yet never been able to justify it) and I intend to set up a 1.5Tb RAID0 array on my Abit IP35 Pro.

Whats the best way of going about this, and what sort of performance gains am I likely to notice?

Thanks!
 
Not sure what sort of performance you'll get but setting it up is easy. Just go into the BIOS and on the HD options, make sure RAID is enabled. After restarting the system, you should now get another option after the initial POST which says something like F10 to set up RAID or along the lines of that. Going in there will enable you to tell it what drives you want to RAID and which mode. Once that is done they will show up in Windows as a single drive which is ready to use.

Although you probably know this, RAID will blank the drives but from what you said, they are brand new anyway?

Are you loading Windows onto them after setting them up or keeping them just as a games drive?
 
Before going down the RAID route it might be worth reading this thread.

From my own experiences I agree that RAID 0 isn't worth it as the on-board controllers don't actually do proper RAID. Its software RAID and you don't get any real performance benefits.
 
You only really get a beneficial performance increase from RAID0 if you are working with large files (i.e., copying/moving video files) or regularly unzipping large files, if you don't do both or either of these there is really no performance benefit and best sticking with single HDD...

the on-board controllers don't actually do proper RAID
Click to expand...

The (onboard) Intel ICHxR controller is fine for RAID0, you will notice no performance gain over using a (true) hardware SATA RAID card (ie one with onboard ram and processor) as opposed to using the ICHxR cont...
 
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I'm happy with the fact I'll need to format both drives. One is new anyway :)

I'm hoping it'll speed up unzipping 1gbish zip files and loading large maps in multiplayer games. Even if it doesnt its a fun experiment anyway.

Presumably Windows will see it as 1 1.5Tb drive which I can partition as I see fit?
 
Yes it will, but if you're installing windows onto it you may need a seperate driver disk for it to recognise the array (F6 prompt for third party driver during windows install). Try it without first though.

Most motherboards seem to have a floppy with the raid drivers on included in the box.
 
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