raid 0

[the_dope_chaud]

I got a great deal on a WD 320 sata2, so I bought it! (80 bucks, canadian or american, dosent matter.. mouhahahaha) and I got my hands on vista, so Im setting up a raid 0 vista in my rig as we speak.
Of cousrse Im keeping that 80 giger IDE for important backups, and I also backup on my file server, so I'm safe. Anybody have some advice and/or comments, would appreciate as this is the first time I build raid 0, for me that is. I put the stripe size to 64 kb and all else auto. Should/can I use my partition method (OS-programs-media) ? And also, I'm strongly led to believe that ALL the hdd has to be used, my raid setup on my mobo led me to believe that, because I only saw the HHDs and not the partitions I was hoping to use. I would like to know if I can set uo, say 150 gigs on each drive to be raid 0 and the rest into 2 independent partitions, is this possible. I dont think so, but I'm sure someone has a solid answer for me.

[Ranzear]

Because of your RAID controller completely taking over handling of the drives, no you cannot run a standalone partition on one drive of an array, not even if its a larger drive in a set with spare space.

Meaning also that if you RAID 0 that 80gig and the 320gig, you'll only get a 160gig drive.

Unless... reading again I seem to note that you have one SATA2 hard drive. RAID is for multiple disks I dearly hope you realize. Its not a magical speed booster for single drives.
Strike that, I see the two in your sig.

Set your block size to optimal/auto.

[the_dope_chaud]

yeah, I guessed so... wanted to hear it from someone else.
holy f*ck is it fast !!!
I had a good laugh when I re-installed my games and apps. especially games, they usually take a few minutes. I installed battlefield 2 in about 30 seconds, begining to end. I found it ridiculously fast !!!! and I set up my machine with all the fixings in about a half-hour, vista ain't so problematic (anymore), I found drivers for all my stuff quite easily

[darkorb]

hey dope, im gonna be doing the same thing as you. how did u install the raid drivers for the mobo/hd?

how did u do it?

[Ranzear]

Your drivers should already be installed. You have an ASUS board with an NVidia chipset with RAID built in, so it can't be too different from mine. Go to your BIOS and look for Onboard Device shiznat. Enable RAID and further enable it for each SATA port of the drives you want to use in the array (But not the ones you're using otherwise, or it will disable them, its RAID or Not RAID) then at startup you'll get an extra bootup screen with 'Press F# to enter RAID setup utility'. Do make sure you've gotten everything off any drives you're setting up because this is essentially a repartitioning. Pick the drives, set them to RAID 0, go with the automatic/optimal settings. From there you have to boot a separate drive or start a fresh Windows install so you can format them to NTFS.

200mb/s on three 320gb 7200.10s here, AAK Firmware even.

I love loading HL2 levels in ten seconds.

[darkorb]

i might aswell just go out and buy 2 200gb drives or something

im gonna order the HD's tonight

in windows, would it show up as 1 drive or two?

[Ranzear]

One drive with the name 'NVIDIA RAID STRIPE'.

Unfortunately it effectively disables in-OS SMART monitoring, but you get a checkup every bootup when it verifys the array.

[darkorb]

i dont no what that means

but it works fine in vista correct? im gonna go check my bios if i have that in there, the raid stuff

[the_dope_chaud]

raid 0 works with vista, I did it this afternoon.
a brief story-
in bios, advanced settings, I turned on the raid function on raid channel 0 and 1.
I rebooted, and pressed F10 for raid menu, put both drives in raid programmation.
re-booted, starting vista install. whe it was time, when prompted for drivers, I showed it the way to the drivers on my floppy. it installed those pretty fast, then continued installing vista.
once in vista, I made my three partitions as per usual.


BTW, what he said about smart not working and seing the health at boot; you will see if you make a raid array, after your bios bootup, before OS boot, there is a screen that shows you your array and it's health.

[darkorb]

k thanks alot, my budget isnt big enough for dual drives, ggonna go for 1 500gb, 80gb part for windows, the rest for games and porn :)

[Ranzear]

As I already mentioned, you can get two 320gig drives and stripe them for just a little more ($25?) than that 500gig. Plus they'll spank the damn thing in speed.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148140

Take your time with these things, do the research, and make the better decision. $25 for 80% faster and an extra 140gig?

[the_dope_chaud]

sounds good to me !!!
or just buy a 320 for now and wait untill you can get another.