Need Help in my first RAID Matrix Array.

[_3mp3ror_]

Hi and glad to be here.
I had in my system a 300GB velociraptor, once that died after 1 year, I decided to make a raid system.
My MB is P5Q-E it has the ich10r and the Sil5723 chipset.

I bought 3 drives but I will buy a fourth one to make a 128 GB Raid 0 volume and a ~ 1,08 TB RAID 10 partition. I currently have a RAID 5 which I is useless for me. I did two power tests cutting the power to the PC while it copied to every partition on it. The system was ok but it took 6 hours to initialize the RAID 5 array.

So my current setup is for now: 3 x WD6401AALS and 1 x WD6400AAKS that Is for backup.

So here are my questions:
1. When I make a Matrix array out of 4 drives. The first volume will be raid0 and second raid 10.
- if the RAID 0 partition should fail what will I do then ?
- what about a disk fail ? can I access the backup data from another OS ?
2. What backup software works good with a RAID setup ?
3. Can I use it to put the resulting backup onto 1 single non-raid disk ?
5. Some people reported having problems with version 8.9 of Intel Matrix's Manager for Windows. Did you have any problems with 8.9 ?
6. Regarding TLER setting - apparently I can not set this on the ICH10R chipset with the BLACK Caviar's - there is no problem with WD6400AAKS-
Is there another way to enable this ?
7.Finally
Allocation unit/Partition offset/Stripe size:
- for first volume I am thinking - 4K/256K/128K
- for second volume (data, movies, music, downloads) -32K/256K/128K
7.1 With what software can I offset a partition ?
- I know how to resize the cluster but what about the partition, does it mean that I simply leave a 256K gap of unallocated space on the beginning of each partition ?

Thanks in advance to those who had the patience to read this and help me out.

Regards.

 

[_3mp3ror_]

This forum is kind of quiet.
I found the info I was looking for (most of it) so this topic can be closed.