Help with a new sata raid 0 array.

[Ricedaddy]

Hello all,

I'm looking for some advice, I just built a new machine and I'm interested in putting two Western Digital Black 640gb drives in a raid 0 array. I've looked all over the web but all the guides I'm seeing are very outdated. I have never used a sata raid array, I have set up raid back in the day using IDE drives, but it's been ages.

A few points:
1) I'm doing this for fun, as well as just to get a little extra speed. Honestly, the desire is mainly because I've never done it before and it will be enjoyable to play with.

2) I know that a raid 0 array is more dangerous than just a single drive and I'm sacrificing reliability for speed. I have a 250gb backup drive in the pc, a 500gb external, as well as a 1tb NAS, so redundancy is not really an issue.

Thanks for the help.

 

[sub.mesa]

Advice on what really? ;-)

I read no questions. So you want to try RAID0 with Serial ATA disks. You have two options:
1. use Windows' software RAID0 (no boot support), should be quite fast
2. use onboard RAID drivers for your chipset vendor (AMD/nVidia/Intel)

Keep in mind that RAID0 only works well if you set it up in the right conditions. You can't solve all Windows limitations, but you should at least use Vista or Win7 as XP has nasty partition misalignment killing random I/O performance of RAID0. If you really want XP, you can use GParted/MagicParted/PartedMagic to create the partition, then reboot and enter XP setup to install to the created partition. That would allow a properly aligned partition.

To check alignment once installed, google on AS SSD benchmark and download it. It might take a long time to finish, but it's quite a useful benchmark. Check whether it says "1024K- OK" and not "31.5K - BAD"; the latter would indicate a misalignment issue. Anything with "OK" is good.

It also shows interesting benchmark scores; good luck!

 

[Ricedaddy]

Yeah, I suppose I should be a little more clear: I need some advice on how to actually go about setting one up, I have a hardware raid controller on the motherboard, that's what I plan on using. The OS I am currently running is Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

 

[sub.mesa]

What you have on your motherboard is onboard RAID and its software based.

Here's how you use it:
- enter system BIOS (hit del on power up)
- set Serial ATA controller to RAID mode
- save and exit; now upon power-up you should see a text screen about your RAID controller; hit a key to enter the setup (Control+F for example)
- once you entered the RAID BIOS utility, create the RAID0 array with cursor keys, and sometimes the tab button; save and reboot when done
- now boot from Windows DVD setup
- load RAID drivers from USB pendrive (not required in some cases like Intel; they are already integrated)
- be sure to create a new partition (delete any existing) and install Windows accordingly