Windows 7 - Setting up RAID between 80 GB and 500 GB?

I ordered a second drive to RAID with my new 500 GB drive. Some sites, however, say that you should only RAID together two identical drives. Is this correct? Both drives are from Western Digital. Thanks!

It's best for them to be identical, but it's not absolutely required. What is required is for the drives to be the same size.

If the two drives were together in RAID, won't the array be based off of the smaller drive? In RAID 0 at least, right? RAIDing the two drives together would net a 160GB array--essentially wasting 420GB of the 500GB drive, right?

So RAID wouldn't be the best option? My goal is to install Windows in the smaller drive and install all my games on the larger one. Would just plugging in the drives work fine and installing from there?

You don't need RAID to do that. You simply would have 2 drives. A C drive for Windows and a D drive for your games.

Yes, just plug them both in and install to the appropriate drive.

Seems to be solved, but more info on RAID 0...
Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alright, I just wanted to be sure. I've heard great things about RAID but it's apparent it wouldn't be useful for this type of thing. Thanks for the help, you can mark this as solved!

RAID 0 is a mixed bag. On one hand, it increases your read and write speeds and drops your access time slightly. On the other hand, your chances of data loss double since you have 2 hard drives and if either one fails, you lose everything.

Personally, RAID 0 is great in some scenarios...for example if you are doing very large file copies or file manipulations. But for booting the OS and running most games, I've really not seen much of an improvement.

If you really want to speed things up, get a single SSD drive for your operating system. These have almost instantaneous access....usually in the .1ms range...versus 12-15ms for a standard hard drive. Plus, they have sequential read times of 200-250MB/s. These really make the computer fly. On problem is that they are somewhat pricey for a small amount of disk space. But trust me, it's the best upgrade investment that one can make. I don't know a single person who purchased an SSD drive and regretted it.

I'll second that.

And I've gone the budget route with the SSD, but it does give an overall improvement to system speed.

(Kingston SSDNow V Series SNV425-S2 64GB @ $144 on Newegg.com)

If you can do it, do it. If you got the money for better, do it.

I'll definitely look into investing in one of these. I've heard great things about SSD, but the price really turned me off. That Kingston drive is actually pretty reasonable compared to the other ones out there.