hard drive setup, with raid

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sploiz

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currently i have 2 80gb hard drives. one with xp and one with vista premium upgrade. i'm gonna be getting vista ultimate soon so i don't have to worry about having xp installed too. now my current setup is kinda messed up and i wanna fix it when i get vista ultimate.

would it be the best to put the 2 80gb drives in a raid 0 array and use that for the os and programs, then use the 500gb drive for storage? i just wanna get the most out of what i have.

i'd like to think i'm right.... like i always do. but i'd really like to get the opinions of people who actually know what they are talking about.
 
Wait, why are you getting Vista Ultimate in the first place if you already have a Vista OS on your PC? What features of Ultimate warrants the additional $180 or so for it? How is your setup going to be fixed when you get Ultimate?

And it would help us if you told us what motherboard you have and what chipset it is based on.

Also, it depends on your definition of "best." Is RAID 0 best for performance? Kind of depending on the RAID controller and hard drive. Is RAID 0 best for simplicity and reliability? Not really since you now have three possible points of failure: The RAID Controller and the two hard drives.
 
yeah i guess i should have explained it. i was gonna use the vista premium upgrade on another on my computer so i don't have to deal with having xp installed on my main one too. i got vista ultimate because a friends company bought a a bunch for one of their clients and they got too many so i was able to get it off their hands for extremely cheap.

when i said best i was meaning the best preformance. i'm not worried about one drive dieing and losing everything. i normally make a weekly image of my drives.

my motherboard is a GA-965P-DS3 rev2. the 2 hard drives are just 2 western digital 80gb drives.

the only other thing that i can think of the might effect it is my computer is overclocked so i'm not sure if that will hurt a raid array.
 
Yes, RAID0 would give you the best transfer rate possible with your current hardware. You'll need to use the purple SATA ports on your board for the two 80GB drives. Your OC shouldn't affect your RAID array.
 
RAID0 gives the best theoretical transfer rate, but real-life single-user loads often show no difference to single drives, and are sometimes slower in situations such as Windows startup. They scale to multiple simultaneous operations very well, but this kind of load rarely happens on a single-user machine. For questionable performance increases but undeniable increased failure probability, I don't think RAID0 is a good option for many people.
 
Mithent said:
RAID0 gives the best theoretical transfer rate, but real-life single-user loads often show no difference to single drives, and are sometimes slower in situations such as Windows startup. They scale to multiple simultaneous operations very well, but this kind of load rarely happens on a single-user machine. For questionable performance increases but undeniable increased failure probability, I don't think RAID0 is a good option for many people.
Click to expand...

I have been running 2x80GB Hitachi drives in a RAID-0 array for 3 years now. A few times I went back to a single drive and I noticed the decreased performance. This occured mostly during the transferring of large files and the extraction for RAR archives that were 2+ GB's in size.

I will always running a RAID-0 after my own personal experiences.
 
Whether you notice it or not depends on what you're doing. Oddly enough, my RAID0 array starts up windows faster than my Raptor... go figure. If you do a lot of sequential reads/writes, you'll notice the difference. The best way to figure out if you benefit from RAID0 is to try it out, since you say you have nothing to lose (data is backed up anyhow); at least now you're making an informed decision.
 
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