advice on raid set up

bogwalrus

I have all my parts ready to be assembled for my first build.

I just need some advice on how to set up my raid.

I have a 300gb ide, and two 200gb sata drives.

I would be mainly using this comp for gaming and movies. What would you recommend me doing with these drives. Should i install windows on the 300gb and have the other two drives in raid 0? I could possibly use the 300gb as storage and just have windows on the raid setup with the games and stuff.

I have alot of data on the 300gb already with windows installed on it previously so can i keep all this data when building this new comp?

I anyone has any experience and tips that could help me it would be much appreciated.I dont really know where to start with the setting up either so some tios here would be great=)

i hope you can help, thanks.

PogMoThoin

Keep the 300Gb ide as storage and setup raid 0 on other 2 sata's. This way you can keep all the data on the 300Gb.

Shiny

Use raid 0 with the 2 200gig hardrives.
Only store data that you can afford to lose on this array.

Put all your movies and music on the 300 gig.

I always treat my raid0 array as if it could fail at any time
so all my documents, music, video etc are stored on other
hardrives.

It would be better to reinstall windows on the new array
and just copy over the data you need from the 300gig.

bogwalrus

thanks for the advice guys. I will go with installing windows on the raid 0 and use the ide for storage.

So should i boot the raid without the ide when first installing windows?

Do any of you have a link to a site that can help me with the "how to's" like installing, partitioning and booting of harddrives. I imagine i will have to partition the two drives before i install windows yeah? How would i go about this? Can it be done through bios?

PogMoThoin

So should i boot the raid without the ide when first installing windows?

Yes, might make things easier

I imagine i will have to partition the two drives before i install windows yeah? How would i go about this? Can it be done through bios?

You just setup raid by pressing ctrl + I on boot after bios screen and configure your raid. Windows will format the raided drives during install.

BTW, what operating system? if its Xp you'll need to have the raid driver on floppy or memory stick as Xp wont recognise the raid volume. You press f6 during insytall when prompted to install it. If its Vista you'll be ok, as Vista already has a raid driver, just update to newer driver when its up and running.

bogwalrus

im using xp. My motherboard has that in built raid matrix thing so will it not recognise it?

Gadgetman496

PogMoThoin wrote: »

BTW, what operating system? if its Xp you'll need to have the raid driver on floppy or memory stick.

Set up RAID using XP from a Memory Stick?



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PogMoThoin

bogwalrus wrote: »

im using xp. My motherboard has that in built raid matrix thing so will it not recognise it?

No, your Xp install will not recognise the raided drives until you install the driver. Have the driver ready on a memory stick or floppy. It'll be on your motherboard disk. You'll be prompted to "press f6 to install 3rd party drivers" during Xp install.

bogwalrus

ah i see. thanks for the advice. i could probably be figuring all this out myself through trial and error but i am not one for taking risks. ran into another issue so havent even got to booting the comp yet. is it bad that my cpu heatsink fins are close to the north bridge heatsink? does the northbridge heatsink normally get very hot? I Got a thermatake hr-03 heatsink for my 8800 and reversed it so that too is also very near to the northbridge heatsink. I have a feeling that area is just going to get super hot. might just get a water cooling for the northbridge.

toco123

You could put your games on the raid setup unless there using a protection gimmick like steam or whatever bioshock uses... All other games could be thrown onto the setup or any programs which are typically easy to reinstall but not too important either