Hi, I've been working with computers since I was 3 and building them since 12 or so, and I've always had no trouble figuring things out. I recently bought a 500GB seagate raid drive, and tried to install it multiple ways like I usually do to figure new things out, but no matter what I try, I can't get it to show up in my computer. There are 8 connections for raid drives on my mobo, 4 red ones listed raid 1 to raid 4, and 4 black ones listed raid 1 to raid 4. The drive had a jumper block on it and listed the position it was in when I bought it as 'limited to 1.5 gb/s' and showed no jumper block as '3 gb/s' so I removed the jumper block. When I boot up my system, it says no valid device when it gets to the RAID part, though sometimes it went normally when I tried a different way to plug it in. I know that most people use 2 raid drives and make an array, but I would have thought you could use a single raid drive. What am I doing wrong, and are the benefits from having an array of 2 drives worth the extra $120? (I'm a hardcore gamer). Thanks for the help!

What motherboard and hard drive have you got?

You usually will have an option in the BIOS that sets SATA ports to IDE compatible mode. This would be the best option for a single disk system.

As mentioned you usually have to check the bios... My default settings on my mobo (Nforce 4) are that the sata are disabled. which is stupid. So poke around your bios looking for different settings. As mentioned IDE mode is the simplest way to set it up..

As for arrays, you can have one drive mirror another so you dont suffer data loss.

You can stripe which gives increased throughput (as it can read/write data to two drives at once) although you sacrifice data security as if one drive fails... buh bye data.

Theres also newer arrays which support mirroring and striping to give good performance and data security... generally you need atleast 3-4 drives for this though.

Arrays are a fantastic approach to better performance or increased data security(safety)

But if you cant afford another drive... dont bother. Simple as.

Thanks for the info. I was wondering though, wasn't IDE the type of connection older hard drives use? I used to be running a 70GB hard drive that wasn't RAID, and was hoping for increased performance from running windows off this new RAID drive, which also leads me to my next question. What options to I have in transferring my installation of windows to my new drive? I was hoping I could just mirror everything somehow so everything would run exactly the same just off the new drive, then I could delete the info from the old drive.

As for system specs, here is some copypasta for you

Microsoft Windows XP
Home Edition
Version 2002
Service Pack 2

AMD athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
2.01ghz, 2.00 GB of RAM
Nvidia 7800 GT 512 MB (Single card, I'm running on dad's money )

The old drive I'm not to sure of the specs, 70 something GB 7200 RPM, IDE hard drive
New one is a 500GB seagate barracuda, 32MB buffer, 7200 RPM RAID drive

I went into setup today and checked my raid ports, the IDE option on all the ports was set to auto, so I'm assuming it should set things up automatically. If I can't get it working by Teusday I'm just going to take it in and pay an exorbitant amount of money to get some certified 17 year old to put it in for me.

In device manager it is listed as working properly. Under the volumes tab the information is as follows:
Disk: Disk 1
Type: Unknown
Status: Not Initialized
Partition style: Not Applicable
Capacity: 476938 MB
Unallocated space: 476938 MB
Reserved space: 0 MB

Why on earth would anyone try to run 1 drive in RAID configuration? An incorrect setup with two drives can run slower than a single drive. I run two 500GB Seagates in RAID 0 and personally if I only had one drive, I wouldn't bother with it. If however you do find some benefit to it, please post up some benchmarks for interesting reading.

dt: some points to think about:
1) To set up a RAID array, you normally have to:
a) set the specific ports the drive(s) are connected to to RAID mode in the normal BIOS.
b) then, in the RAID BIOS, select one or more drives to be part of a RAID volume, and create that volume in the RAID BIOS.
c) for Windows to recognize the RAID volume properly, you normally need to load one or two additional RAID-specific drivers (these come with the MB or can be downloaded from the MB maker's web site).
2) Some older MBs don't always properly recognize the 3Gb/s SATA interface speed, so you may have to reinstall that jumper on the drive and have it run in the older 1.5Gb/s SATA interface mode. This will NOT affect the speed of your drive, since 1.5Gb/s is already faster than your drive's sustained data transfer rate.
3) You keep referring to your hard drive as a "RAID drive"; technically, any drive can be run in RAID mode or not in RAID mode, so consumer drives are not normally described/sold as "RAID drives". However, there are some drives sold specifically for use in fault-tolerant RAID arrays (e.g. RAID 1, 3, etc, but NOT RAID 0) that have specialized firmware that actually *reduces* the drive's own error correction capability (this is so that an error in a single drive doesn't slow down the whole array, the missing data being supplied by other drives in the array anyway). Such specialized drives are actually worse for normal consumer non-fault-tolerant array use. If you by mistake bought such a drive, consider buying at least one more and setting up a fault-tolerant RAID array (not RAID 0!).

I see the confusion that my inexperience with RAID drives has caused. I was under the impression that the type of hard drives that are being manufactured today were RAID drives, as opposed to the older IDE drives. The hard drive I was previously using connects using IDE cables, and the new one connects using the newer type, be it RAID or whatever it is rightfully called. I only want to run a single drive, not an array with one drive. Basically, I just need the extra space, and the added performance from the newer type of drive should help too, unless you're saying that there is no difference.

Edit: I should've known, I've been meaning ATA not RAID.

No worries DT, best of luck with it all.

Ah, dt, you mean "SATA", not "RAID". It all makes sense now...

So now that we're talking SATA, any advice?