DescentBB

I finally got the cash to pack my system with hard drives, I got 3 200 gig drives. The one drive I simply set up as a normal IDE drive, no problem. The other 2 I stuck into an IDE raid slot and set up a RAID 0 in the BIOS easy enough. I can't get windoze to recognise it at all.

ASUS A8V Deluxe motherboard and identical 200 gig Maxtor drives if it helps any.

Thanks in advance

Were you planning to use the RAID 0 array as your boot drive? If so you need to find the drivers for your RAID controller and stick em on a floppy so Windows can find em during installation.

If you werent going to use it as your boot drive, you still need to install and configure your RAID controller in Windows. Go to Asus's website and look for drivers.

If the RAID driver is already installed go into disk management and partition then format the new drive.

What I had to do was go on the CD I have, look up some files, put them on a floppy, and as Windows is installing press F6 (I think).

You have to look up your model etc. to find out what to put on the Floppy.

Figured out what it was, the motherboard CD had the wrong drivers, go figure.

You do realise of course, that Raid 0 will ruin you?

RAID 0 is not to be relied upon, and it effectively halves the reliability of your single system drive. Unless you regularly ghost that installation, you will end up losing the lot.

Unless you have a very specific task in mind for your RAID 0 array, then I recommend you simply use the three disks like normal, or for better fault tolerance, use those two disks as RAID 1 - which provides 4 times the fault tolerance level of RAID 0 - and still provides plenty of Read performance (while Write speeds won't improve).

Yeah, I spent most of today trying to recover data from a RAID 0 with one failing drive - guy just has to have his data, and no backup

Which is why I keep everything of value that I don't have burned to DVDs or stored on other more reliable media on up to three other hard drives in different computers at the same time rather then trusting it all to my single 800 GB RAID 0.

Not only do I archive data on Cd's/DVD's, I also have an External 160GB Firewire HD.
Once every 2 weeks I just drag My Documents folder over to my Lacie...backed up!!

So in the event I do have to replace my Internal HD's after I install the O/S.....just drag my files back over. Anything else I am missing can be found in my Hard copy archive.

PS : posting before coffee is not good

turn to the light side

Some IDE controlers will even let you do RAID 5. That would at least give you some redundancy and increase the size of the partition. It will slow down the reads and writes to the drive but with the speed of the drives and controlers you might not notice too much.

RC