Sata raid or single

[Mhypertext]

My question is raid really that much faster to waste 80 Gigs worth of space

Or should i just run a single sata 80 and call it good (i have 2 of the same exact HD's) becuase i dont want to waste my time formatting and reinstalling for a minor increase in speed.

I play a lot of PC games if raid will decrease my load times i am all for it.

However if one sata is going to be just as fast as 2 80 gigs in Raid i'll just leave the Beast alone.....

[Vio1]

There is no waste of space when you raid a drive (unless the 2 drives are of different sizes). If you have two 80 gig drives, then when you setup raid-0, windows will read it as one 160gb drive. There is a very noticeable improvement with 7200rpm drives in raid-0. You will notice the difference and it is worth the money.

[Mhypertext]

raid 0 you say and how do i choose what raid i want to use ???

I am newb to raid yes i live in the past

[Mhypertext]

Ok my board sees my 2 drives in raid

after i boot and get into the window install screen i hit f6 when i try to load my drivers its says txtseup.oem file caused error

[dark_15]

First of all for your RAID question:
There are several types of RAID.

RAID 0 - (striping) takes two drives and allows for simultaneous reading and writing of data on both drives. Windows will see one large drive (2x 80 GB drives will be seen as one 160 GB drive)

RAID 1 - (mirroring) takes two drives and copies the same data onto each drive. If one drive dies, you have a backup drive to run Windows with. RAID-1 will also increase read speeds on your hard drive as well.

Second, what motherboard are you using?

Third, I am assuming you are using a floppy with your RAID drivers on it. It sounds like the floppy is bad. You may need to find a new floppy and make sure that you have the correct drivers for your RAID setup.

Hope that helps!

[Mhypertext]

OK i unhooked my ide drives and it installed XP on my Sata raid 0 setup

but when i plugged my ide drives in (one having windows xp on it) it only sees the ide drives and does not let me boot into my fresh install....

i thought it would list my installs and let me pick which one i want to load (like a multiple Opertaing system boot).

what gives now????

[sean478]

u need to have someone profecient in multible os instalation edit ur boot.ini file then u wil see the other windows instalation for now u can get to that installation by chooseing it as ur boot drive in ur bios

[dark_15]

Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from SATA first, then your IDE drives second.

EDIT: Sean - Boot.ini file? That's only if you want to boot from multiple partitions on the same hard drive!

[uthungover]

EDIT: Sean - Boot.ini file? That's only if you want to boot from multiple partitions on the same hard drive!
No, NTloader uses the boot.ini file. It's used for startup options and for multiple MS OS systems regardless of what disk or partition they are on. If you do your fresh install of XP with your IDE drive plugged in your fresh install is written into your boot.ini file.

Raid arrays really make a difference when working with large files. It also depends on the cluster and chunk size you choose when you set up your drives. Generaly large clusters with lare chunk (stripe) size do well for large files like video but will do poorly tranfering alot of small files. Small clusters (Windows 4k default) with a small stripe size will do well with small files. I would lean towards a small stripe size and default cluster size for games. You'd probaly notice a nice speed increase in load times but I can't say for sure.