ICH9R and Raid 0

[ToxicBanana]

Can I make a raid 0 with two hard drives then later add another hard drive to it? or do I have to loose all data and start again?

 

[ToxicBanana]

Seems I found the best of both worlds

Raid 0 and Raid 5 on 1 array, I would need to buy all 4 drives now though, as ICH9R support no expansion of any kind.

(4) 750GB Samsung F1, 3Tb, 7.5% Raid 0, 92.5 Raid 5 = 200GB Raid 0, 2.1TB Raid 5

 

[ToxicBanana]

To what I read is that if you have "Write Caching" Enabled you get a 8x-10x in write speeds in a Raid5 setup (bench I was looking at was Raid 5 (4) 500gb, "Write Caching" 13.3MB/s off, 141MB/s on, but if your computer crashes (blue screen) or you loose power (power failure) you have to rebuild the Raid5 and that can takes hours.

My question are;

1) What do I expect to see with a Raid0 setup with "Write Caching" Disabled

 

[ToxicBanana]

Seems I found the answer to my own question.

A single hard drive with Write caching disabled suffers the same performance loss as the raid 5, so raid 0 would be the same.

 

[Fatespilot]

Can I make a raid 0 with two hard drives then later add another hard drive to it? or do I have to loose all data and start again?

I have 3 WD640AAKS in this setup with no problems. I could not get XP SP3 to recognize Matrix Raid without major hassle. Jmicron worked but was not a major improvement, only +10mb/sec over a single drive. Vista 64 was a super easy install without having to pre-format. With ICH9R you can add single drives and keep the RAID 0 intact.

1 640AAKS
Avg. Read = 110mb/sec

2 640AAKS Matrix Raid 0
Avg. Read = 200mb/sec