Formatting drives Help please

pantheman

Distinguished
Dec 22, 2007
19
0
18,510
I’ve created a Raid 0 with two 320gb drives using the intel drivers during the F6 setup. I’m trying to format the drives so window XP pro SP2 with see the drives. Under Driver management, the 2 drive show as disk 1, Dynamic, 596.18gb,online, unallocated.
When I right click the drive it gives me the options of creating a new volume, then I’m given 3 options to choose from
simple,
spanned, or
striped.
My question is, which is the right choice for my raid 0 drives?
(I will use the drives for video productions) Since it’s already been setup by XP as dynamic disk, the opition of a new partition is not available, unless I convert them to a basic drive.
Which is better for my needs.?
I read the info in the help section but it was not clear which was the right choice for raid 0. I want it to be one large drive, not divided into small partitions. Thanks for your help. (This is my first build, total newbie.)

 
Since you are using hardware RAID via your on-board controller, you want to choose a simple volume. Setting as "simple" will allow you to format it all into 1 tidy partition just like windows is seeing now, all as 1 drive.
Windows has it's own option of setting up disk spanning, raid, (or striped) via software, if you don't have the hardware to do it. You don't want to do this.
 

blacksci

Distinguished
Jan 25, 2008
818
0
19,010
Of course you should have a seperate partition for your os, in case something happens and you have to reformat, and a third hardrive wouldnt hurt, cuz if one harddrive goes down, and you have something you CANNOT replace, its lost for good, since half of the information is on the other drive....