Hard Drive on RAID Question

ok first of all y is raid better than pluging into IDE? and to get my harddrives to work on raid what do i have to do besides plug it into the raid slot

Well you should checkout the sticky about RAID, that will give you a start.

Your view of RAID and IDE are wrong and that article will help ya out

Raid is best when used for raid, but functions as an ordinary hard drive controller even if you do not want to use a raid array.

By moving your hard drive(s) to the raid ports on your motherboard, you will usually be able to improve the data transfer by having only one device per IDE/raid channel. You should never connect any device other than hard disks to the raid controller.

The only things you will have to do besides plugging the drives into the raid port(s) without setting up a raid array are 1) Enable the raid controller in the system bios but this is usually ON by default, and 2) Set the boot sequence in bios to include and entry like ATA100RAID (the exact name will be different for various motherboard manufacturers) .

Running a hard drive on a RAID controller not in a RAID setup will not yeild any performance differences unless your board is old enough that it uses ATA66 and the RAID card supports Serial ATA or ATA100, and your hard drives support it as well.

The advantages of a RAID array will be noticable, depending on the speed of the drives (RPM and Cache) you use.

To set up a RAID array (if that's what you want to do), get two (preferably) identical drives (although I think as long as they have the same number of cylinders and heads, it doesn't matter if they're the same, you'll just lose a little performance). Connect them each to a channel on the RAID card. Then follow the directions in the RAID card's manual on how to set it up. If it's an onboard RAID controller, directions will be in the mobo manual.

Z