Help setting up RAID 0 or 1

[GRYT7]

Hello, I would like to configure RAID 0 or 1 (not sure which) on my computer which has 2 identical hard drives. I'm not worried about losing data because I have to reformat my hard drive anyway. Another thing: is there a guide to installing XP pro? The part that I'm not familiar with is hard disk partitions. I'm fairly new to this kind of stuff so help would be greatly appreciated!

[bugabooz]

I have raid 0 on my pc with windows xp professional. There is no need for a guide really, you just turn on the computer, open bios, enable hard drive 1 and hard drive 2 for RAID. Then boot your cd drive. It should ask you to install xp, and it will ask you to partion your hard drives. Click ok, and it will do what it needs to do (this can take a long time depending on how big the hard drive is) Then you will need to insert the RAID boot disk. You must have a floppy drive to do this. You can also make a boot disk from the motherboard disk. Then you finish your installation, and your ready to go

[GRYT7]

OK i follow you up until the RAID boot disc. So I just leave the partition part set to default? What is a RAID boot disc? And what's that about a floppy drive??

[meat_helmet]

Firstly you will have to make sure that your motherboard has RAID support, if it doesnt, then you will need a RAID controller card.

Next, consult the motherboard manual for RAID setup, each is a little different but normaly you will have to copy drivers from the cd onto a floppy or something similar. You will need the RAID drivers when installing windows.

Really read through the motherboard manual first. RAID 0 is probably the one you want - it strips the two drives together to make one drive with double the space (eg. 2x80Gbs = 160Gb raid0) and doubles the speed. RAID 1 just mirrors the first drive and is more for drive protection so i dont think that is what your after.

[GRYT7]

ok tomorrow i will check my motherboard manual (ASUS P5B DELUXE). I called a local comp techie and he said that RAID 0 only gives about 10-15% performance increase. I'll look a little more into that also.

[wrestlingnrj]

I helped set up RAID 0 for a friend of mine and I would say that it was more than a 10-15% jump, I have never seen windows install faster, and everything runs a lot quicker.

[veedubfreak]

I tried setting up raid 0 on my machine over the weekend but everytime it tried to start windows when installing it gave me a BSOD, i tried every possible raid driver i could find, finally gave up on it.