Question about Raid performance

[tri5cui7]

I'm hoping to jump into this with a quick question. I have two seagate barracudas 7200.12. currently both are separate drives, but I'm thinking of putting them in raid 0. My motherboard is a P5Q and has onboard raid. I was wondering if I'd see a big boost in performance? is it worth the time.

 

[sub mesa]

If you use Intel ICHxR RAID drivers with Write Caching enabled, you'll see nice performance improvements that are the result of using your RAM memory as writeback; just like hardware RAID does. No other onboard RAID has this feature, and its not without danger. But it will be very good for speed, and its 'free'.

I guess you shouldn't use striping RAID if still using Windows XP; Vista and up create partitions without a 'stripe misalignment'; an issue that reduces performance of RAID0-4-5-6 when used on partitions created by Windows XP and lower.

 

[tri5cui7]

I'm using vista ultimate 64. I have a follow up question, is it difficult to make a raid0 when I have already installed vista? should I do a fresh install? I have several other hard drives I can use to back up important data so i'm not to worried about that.

 

[sub mesa]

You always have to do a fresh install, and during the install you need drivers on a USB stick (vista & up can load drivers from usb and cd/dvd).

Some onboard RAID like Intel ICHxR may allow you to switch to RAID without loosing the current data on the drive, but i would keep it simple and backup & reinstall.