Tyring to set up a raid 0 array and failing!

[Drukk]

Trying to set up a raid 0 array and failing

Im trying to set up two 160gb, same make hard drives to work in raid 0 on a new install of windows 2000. Im using an asus A8R32-MVP deluxe motherboard
for this. Now first off, whats the difference between the ULI raid facility and the silicon image sata controller?

I tried to set up the raid from the ULI raid configuration which you get to using ctrl-a from start up. Everything seemed to go great but it then reported hard disk size as 320gb and after installing windows the hard drive size was also reported as 320gb. Im guessing this is totally wrong as raid 0 should give me a hard drive size of 160gb. The raid array from the configuration set up did say Raid 0x2 which would be right though.

This is my first attempt at raid and now Im stuck. Can anyone shed any light on what im doing wrong?

 

[semi-pro waster]

I suspect you are getting a little confused between the various Raid systems here, Raid0 is striping and you will get the combined total of both drives e.g. 320gb so you get faster read/write performance particularly on large files but no redundancy so an increased risk of data loss. Raid1 you have mirroring of a drive so you have an exact copy of the main drive and that gives you 160gb space in this case, you get increased read performance but not writing(in fact you may suffer a slight loss) however you do have a copy of the original hard drive to rely on in case of mechanical failure, this is no use for data corruption though.

 

[Drukk]

thanks, for some reason i was thinking raid 0 halved the hard drive sizes. Got it totally mixed up with raid 1. To think i had it all formatted and then wiped it again cause i thought it was wrong! Oh well, all a learning curve


Can you put partitions in a raid 0 format? Or is there no point really. I know it wont save anything incase of hard drive failure but just keeps things tidy. I have another drive I will be using for manually backing up important data anyway.

 

[rpstewart]

Can you put partitions in a raid 0 format? Or is there no point really. I know it wont save anything incase of hard drive failure but just keeps things tidy. I have another drive I will be using for manually backing up important data anyway.

Yeah, nothing wrong with partitioning a RAID array, I used to do it myself so that I could reinstall windows without affecting the stuff on the other partition.

 

[Drukk]

My last question then before hopefully its all sorted is why does windows 2000 not let me set up partitions on a fresh install? Its only giving me the option to format the whole array. Im sure last time I installed windows I could set all my partitions on install but now this option seems to be gone?

 

[malcolm]

Try deleting the existing partition when windows starts, it should then offer you the chance to make one partition to load windows on.

Once Windoze is loaded you can make new partitions on the unused space.