Raid, is it working? How can I tell?

[leathersmt]

I just installed a new raid card,, and two hardrives, how do I know if I did it right? I know this may sound wierd, but I am new to this stuff, and donw know if I did it right? DO I check and see in systems>? Where do I look to see if both hardirves are recording the input?
is there a way to check?
two 60gig Maxtor hardrives, I used a SIIG Porducts, card, UltraATA 100 PCI RAID card.
Then I put in a new operating system, xp pro, now what?
another question, but that is for another post on another board.....like can I have the 100 gig hardrive I have , and keep the OS on it, with all the programs, and how would I start it? I have it set at the moment as primary slave, but not powered up. Can I plug it back in, and boot this up?
the system I have in the 100gig is the same, XP Pro, with a bunch of my programs on it, will it conflict with the OS I just installed?
thanks for the help everyone.

New, configuration:
P4PE 2.8 malaysian Intel chip
1024 Corsair 2700 2 sticks 512mb
Radeon 9700 128mb
SB AUDIGY 2 Platinum w/Inspire 5.1
two 60gig Maxtors RAID 0 (I think)
100gig IBM for storage

 

[deathstar13]

u can control which powers up first in the bios under boot options.
i use sisoft sandra to check my raid drives.run the file system benchmark and just compare your score to the others.this is best way i know to check em.

 

[Ice_Gargoylle]

you can keep youre 100 gig drive as the boot disk for ease of installation, reformatt the array drives and i would personnally break the drive into 5 or so ~20 disks, it will be nice down the road

you may get a prompt as to which version of XP to load upon boot up, dual booot system.

i would just keep everything thats on the 100 gig storage as it is and sett he array up as youre new storage/program disk.

Also, after you clean up the old 100gig disk leaving os only, you can now backup youre array to it just in case youre array fails, which means evrything goes bye bye.

Idealy youd want the os on the raid array in its own partition of say 15-20 gigs, you could* hook up youre old drive, boot to the array at promt, then procede to back everything up onto the array then do a clean sweep of the old 100 gigger, make some partitions and then use it fofr storage

i hope i got all this right, but im sure some1 will say something if its not, right guys?

oh ya, btw, you know if youre array is working bye "my computer" properties; the array disk and it should be a full ~114 gigs if it has no partitions. If you partione dit, just add up all the partitioned drives and it should be ~ 114 or so

good luck