Setting up RAID 0

[UK_Force]

Ok I am going to start an overhaul this evening.

BIOS Update
Data Back up

Then I am going to set up RAID 0 on 3 HDD's - 250gb each, through Windows 7.

As far as I can tell this will give me increased HDD performance, but nil redundancy, ie 1 HDD I lose the lot. (I am happy with that).

Will this mean I will end up with one drive of 750gb, or not, ie will I lose storage space ?


I believe Striped Volume is RAID 0





Actually I have a 4 port SATA RAID Card sat at home in my box of bits ..... not sure how to use it though ...lol



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[Street28]

Then I am going to set up RAID 0 on 3 HDD's - 250gb each, through Windows 7.

I wouldn't waste my time with software RAID within Windows.. Its awful and the performance won't be as good as a separate controller.

Will this mean I will end up with one drive of 750gb, or not, ie will I lose storage space ?

I believe Striped Volume is RAID 0

Yep.. Thats right, RAID0 is striping and you will end up with around 750GB of space available.. It will probably be slightly lower due to the way harddrives are formatted though.

Actually I have a 4 port SATA RAID Card sat at home in my box of bits ..... not sure how to use it though ...lol

That would be the best option depending on the make of the card, using a separate controller is always better than letting the OS handle it. Although a lot of cheaper cards are still "fake RAID" anyway though and rely on the CPU to handle the operations.

Its fairly easy to use a controller card. If you drop it in the system, when you boot up, there will be an extra screen shown at POST that will have the RAID card details. You will usually have to press a couple keys (ctrl - a or something similar) and this will take you into the RAID configuration. You can then set up the array through this.

It might be worth checking if your board has RAID built in.. A lot of newer boards with the Intel ICH and ATI chipsets will support it, you just need to enable it in the BIOS. What model is your board? If you are willing to spend a bit of cash, you could get a proper hardware RAID card which is the best solution.. But these aren't cheap! My PERC5 card cost around £120 not including battery backup etc..

[UK_Force]

It might be worth checking if your board has RAID built in.. A lot of newer boards with the Intel ICH and ATI chipsets will support it, you just need to enable it in the BIOS. What model is your board? If you are willing to spend a bit of cash, you could get a proper hardware RAID card which is the best solution.. But these aren't cheap! My PERC5 card cost around £120 not including battery backup etc..

The one I have is a Promise, FASTRAK S150 SX4-M, with 128mb ram and I believe its own CPU Built on to the card, capable of RAID 5, (4 Port SATA), never used it - its been sat in a box of bits.


The MOBO I have has RAID built in yes - its not that old ...lol.




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[Street28]

That Promise card looks quite good, the only problem is that its only PCI so the bus bandwidth is going to be limited..

I'm running RAID0 on my main PC with my Intel ICH9 chipset board and the performance is great! I'm using two 320GB drives and the average sustained transfer was over 130mb/s. I'd say use your board for it!