raid 0 help

I was thinking of trying to do a raid 0 setup, but never done one before...Is it a good investment..bang for the buck upgrade, and also is there a guide anyone could point me to on how to correctly set it up?

Thanks for any suggestions

The problem with RAID0 is if one drive fails you lose all of the data. Its the only RAID level that actually doesnt provide any redundancy and RAID is designed to provide redundancy. RAID 0 is a stripe between two drives, half data on one and half on the other so effectively you get double the bandwidth. As for setting it up you need to go into the BIOS of the RAID COntroller, its pretty self explanatory, you select the drives, the type of RAID you wish to use, etc. When installing Windows, if you are installing Windows 2000 for example you wil need to press F6 to give Windows 2000 the drivers for the RAID Controller.

Craig

thanks for the info...

Is a raid 0 going to yield a big performance increase over a single 7200 8mb disk?

Also, what some good drives to use in a raid0 setup that aren't too expensive...(no raptors) lol

Performance yes, it effectively doubles your bandwidth. Personally, I use no other than Maxtor Hard-Disk Drives. I work part-time in a computer shop as Im still a student and its very rare that I see a Maxtor Drive RMAed. The Maxtor 120GB Drives with 8MB Cache would make a very nice RAID array.

Craig

I recently set up a Raid-0 on my MSI 266 motherboard (built in) and am very pleased with it. I got two WD 120gb 8mb drives for $70 each (post rebate) and they are just working beautifully. I do a lot of compressing and uncompressing (WAV <=> SHN) of large files and it flies on this.

When setting up the Raid, the stripe size is important for performance. Something like 4kb to 64kb size range. My bios offered three options, desktop, server, audio/video. I choose the latter. I could have specified it in more detail but this went with 64. For gaming I'm not sure what would be best but smaller files do well with smaller stripes and larger ones with large stripes.

I guess I would need a stripe size that is best for gaming and regular day to day computing..no heavy A/V editing or things like that....

64 is probably the best stripe size for you, its inbetween large and small files

Personally, I use no other than Maxtor Hard-Disk Drives. I work part-time in a computer shop as Im still a student and its very rare that I see a Maxtor Drive RMAed.

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I have RMAed 4 Maxtors myself!! One of which was sent to me from Maxtor for an RMA and worked for 3 days before squealing like a pig and grinding to a halt!!!! My brother has RMAed 2 and my best friend has RMAed 1. All bought or got from different places. The only drives I haven't RMAed yet are my 2WDJBs and my Quantum Fireball LOL.

I've RMAd Maxtors, WDs, and IBMs (now Hitachi). I haven't owned Seagates or I'd RMA them too. I really try not to get drives with a 1 year warranty. I must be very hard on them.

With my new motherboard I'm going to begin my new career RMAing SATA drives.