How to configure my HDDs?

[Robert Cartman]

Hi all!

I have a strange problem...

I have a few hard drives, and I want to set them up to get the most performance from them.
The drives are:
1. Maxtor 250GB SATA
2. Samsung 1TB SATA
3. Samsung 1TB SATA
4. Samsung 1TB SATA
5. Seagate 1.5TB SATA
6. Seagate 500GB ATA

First I wanted to make a RAID 0 array from the 3 Samsung, but after I created it, and tried to install Windows 7 on it, during the partitioning the raid array showed up as two separate partition, one with about 2TB of size and an other with about 700GB. That wasn't the only problem. When I tried to install the OS on them, the installation process stopped after the first reboot, with the error message: "Cannot load the file... etc.
I thought that the 3 TB in one partition is too big, so I tried to make a smaller one in the BIOS RAID config utility. So this time I choosed the costum size insted os maximal available size. I set it to 2TB Then I got an error message that the size is too big and not allowed. I tried with 1TB, error again. Finaly I found that 700GB is allowed. Then I tried to install the system on it, but I only got the same error again.
If I tried to make a new partition on the array it gave me an error message too, so finally I gave up the RAID. May be it is a problem of the raid driver of my BIOS.
(Previously I used two WD Raptor drive in RAID 0 with this mobo without any issues.)
I don't give up...
I made a striped array in windows. In that way I can not put an OS on those drives, but at least I can acces the data very fast on them. But after 3 days using it once I turned on my machine and the stripped drive disappeared. They went "offline". I converted them back to normal disk from dynamic. I don't trust in dynamic disks any more.
Now I use only one of them in normal mode, but this is not what I wanted.
I need speed, not only space.
Can anyone tell me how should I set them up to have the maximum out of them?
Thanx in advance!

 

[AMBIOSIS]

This might help ! I turn off " MONITORING " on all drives apart from C:\ Drive. I do not allow indexing on them either. I purley use 3 drives for most of my editing & music apps file source, for E.G. sound samples, and also when editing in Adobe Prem Pro for rendered files. I suppose it depends what you use the additional drives for. Turning discs into " DYNAMIC " slows them down, and is not a good idea. I found that to turn a DYNAMIC disc back to normal mode does not always work as files are left to confuse. I recomend taking data off and just re-format the drive, or delete main drive to an " UNALLOCATED " state in " COMPUTER MANAGEMENT " and then put a fresh installation of windows on it. Hope this was helpful in some way.

 

[whs]

If you want speed, I would replace one of those slow platters with a small SSD (60 to 80GBs) for the OS. No RAID or any setup with the platters can even come close to the SSD system performance. Then you can RAID a few platters just for the data. One single platter I would dedicate for system imaging. From the SSD you can image your system in 4 minutes.

 

[Robert Cartman]

Thanks for the answers!

It seems that I have to buy an SSD drive to solve the question of speed.

And does anyone has any idea why my raid doesn't work with those 3 drives?