A few raid 0 questions

[JonSimonzi]

So I'm finalizing the upgrades on my core hardware, I'm already starting to look at the next upgrade: my hard drives. Right now I have an 80gb and a 160gb sata drives, nothing special. Barley fill them up. So I'm looking at 2x 150gb Raptors, possibly in raid 0. Since I've never setup or used a raid, I'm still fairly inexperienced in it. That's where the nice OCF community steps in :)

1) I understand the basic principal of raid 0. Splits the data among the drives. So say I have those 2x 150gb Raptors. I set them up in raid 0. Would I see 1 300gb drive, or still 2x 150gb drives?

2) If the raid would show it as one 300gb drive, how about partitions? Could I then partition 50gb off for an OS partition, then 250gb for everything else? Can you partition raid drives?

3) How does one actually set up the raid? It would be using the raid controller on the motherboard, which from my understanding you don't install the raid driver for the chipset until after windows is installed, and the drives are already formatted and partitioned.

Thanks for the help on the noob questions, I've never explored raids and setting them up. :)

[Diddyu]

1. 300Gb
2. yup
3. Through the bios, you can choose which drives you would like to be added in an array. I think raid drivers are installed during XP installation, by pressing whatever button the prompt tells you to push. The drives should be formatted and partitioned prior to this, and recognized as one drive in the bios.

[JonSimonzi]

Thanks for the reply Diddy. After I made this post I did a google search on "setting up raid 0", which I admit I probably should have done before making this post :( Answered alot of my questions.

But I do thank you for the help though :)