2 drives - RAID 1 and 0

[SkepticDave]

Hello everyone,

I have a new system (Asus P6t Deluxe V2/i7 920) on the way. It should be here within the next few days! Can't wait! (Upgrading from a Pentium 4 laptop)

Anyway, on to the question...I will have 2 WD 640GB Black's that I would like to run in RAID 0 and RAID 1. Each drive will have 2 partitions, one RAID 0 and one RAID 1. I know this can be done with the intel chipset. But after reading through the motherboard manual, I saw that I will need to put in a size for this RAID 0 array in the BIOS (before I install Vista).

Do I put in the full size of the drives (1.28TB), then convert a percentage of their volume to RAID 1 once I'm in Vista?

Or, Do I only put in the size of the RAID 0 array that I want (200GB) and leave the rest unallocated/unformatted until I get into Vista and can create the RAID 1 array using the Intel Matrix Storage options?

Thanks in advance

 

[SkepticDave]

...Or, do I set up RAID 0 in the BIOS then setup RAID 1 also in the BIOS?

 

[c_schwab]

So you want a RAID 0 array for OS/apps and a RAID 1 array for data? I would create a 100gb partition on each drive, then make a RAID array 0 out of them. After that, partition the remaining space on each drive and create a RAID 1 array out of that.

 

[SkepticDave]

Thanks for the reply. I'm actually up and running with it now. I was able to set both in the BIOS without needing to create partitions first. The RAID 0 was set at 200GB, then the RAID 1 used the remaining. I installed Vista on the RAID 0 array, then once in Vista, I had to initialize and then format the RAID 1 partition.