New
#21
I was experimenting with stripe size after reading some obscure posts concerning raid5 performance on my nvraid. As an old time network engineer, I grew used to putting fast scsi raid5 setups on servers, and getting amazing performance along with data protection. My ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard supported raid5 on the SATA2 bus, so I installed there but found a distinct lack of the performace gains expected of a raid5 controller.
I was preformatting my attempts with a separate drive with XP on it for my tests. The "System Reserved" partition does not have to be before the C: partition. At one point I had a build with OS, them system reserved, then data.
A side note, even a single large disk as I am currently using a 500gb drive to boot on usues a 100mb System Reserved partition to boot, even though I am now using standard cluster sizes.
So go ahead, wipe the drive completely, start your install and drop to command prompt to preformat. Just be sure to leave at least 100mb unused on the disk when you create your OS partition. Win7's install will create the System Reserved partition in the free space.