Which setup to use?

[Morthoseth]

Howdy guys, currently i own two Raptor X's, one had a fit about 6 months ago and i've been meaning to send it back, however after running WD's diagnostics on it yesterday it appears to even outperform the working one!

So for the last 6 months i've had one 150gb drive, and i decided i wanted more storage - today i'm taking delivery of a Spinpoint F1 1TB drive as it was on this week only, and i'm wondering which way i should set them up?

Could i have both raptors in RAID 0 and still have the other drive working independantly? The most hard drives i've ever had is two, so this is somewhat new to me ;p

Any advice would be great

 

[semi-pro waster]

If you want to then you could certainly have the Raptors in Raid0 and the other as independent backup/storage. The only points to note are that you will a) need to format the drives after building the array (i.e. backup anything valuable beforehand) and b) that you will need drivers for Windows to recognise the array.

 

[Morthoseth]

Assuming it would be easier and safer, should i install the OS on the 1tb drive? Reason being, if one of the Raptor's fails again - i dont really want to lose everything, i'd use those for fraps (gaming), and install games on them to benefit from the faster load times.

Is it best to stick with the 1 HDD at the vista install stage, or do i have to set up the raid array from the beginning?

Never really played with raid before, only until the one drive failed (i.e. speeds dropped to 10-15mb, burst rates and seek times were terrible too)

Want to set them up properly this time, to avoid any possible problems

Will be using 64bit Vista on the Asus Striker Extreme mobo