Help needed in Raid setup.

[amigo max]

Hey guys, I want to setup a raid 0 configuration with 2 320GB SATA HDD's.
And for extra i even want to keep my old 500GB and 640GB as storage. (no raid for them.) I dont know what to do, I'm totally a Newcomer in that. Can i be offered with advices on how to do it?
Thank you.

 

[Lomai]

Hi Amigo

Does your motherboard support RAID or will you be using an addon RAID-Controller?

Regards

 

[amigo max]

I have a raid controller card which i'll be using.

 

[alphanumeric]

My Silicon Image RAID card has it's own BIOS. During the PC's boot up I'm prompted to hit F2 to enter the raid setup. The manual for your card (that may be on the driver disk) will tell you how to setup the array. You may have to load the drivers during setup too. Windows 7 will prompt you for them if it doesn't have them. Once the array is setup it will appear as one disk to windows. You will have to set the boot order in your motherboards BIOS as well.

 

[Keiichi25]

I would not recommend a Raid 5 setup for him as he has a 500 and 640 gig Drive. He would be wasting a good amount of space having them coupled with his 2 320 Gig drives.

I would also not recommend him using a Raid 0 setup. Raid 0 is what is called a 'striped' set. This means data would go like this:

Disk 1 Disk 2
A1 A2
A3 A4
A5 B1
B2 B3

If disk 1 fails, you lose data. If disk 2 fails, you lose data. In an OS situation, this is VERY bad.

Raid 1 is the recommended way of surviving things:

Disk 1 Disk 2
A1 A1
A2 A2
A3 A3

The drawback of this, you use up a disk to mirror the other disk. This is good for situations when one drive goes bad... And given you mentioned wanting to do Raid 0, I highly suggest you do not go this route, it will be very problematic for you.

And the only reason I say don't do Raid 5, while I have been in discussions with others say it isn't nearly as bad performance wise, I also find that using a 500 Gig and 640 gig drive as part of a Raid 5 Storage array when your other two drives are 320... you are losing, effectively, 500 gigs of usable space, not counting the fact that you will also lose another 320 to be part of the parity space. That's 820 gigs you lose just to get about roughly 960 Gigs of disk space with redundancy. With a RAID 10 setup, yes, you lose equal to what you will get for redundancy and performance, but to be honest, if you are going to do a RAID 5 setup, you really want to only lose 1 disk drive worth of space, or basically 1/N worth of space if you only use same size disks versus 1/1 which is what you are going to get doing that way.