ICH7 and Raid 0 help???

[magicbullet]

I'm really really new in Raid department. sorry, if i miss or say something inappropriate. i just got two brand new raptors 74GB western digital drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136492&cm_re=raptor-_-22-136-492-_-Product
kind of like that but brand new.
I got a G31 with ICH7 chipset. to be more specific:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130217

I would like to know if i can raid the two hard drives because my motherboard doesnt say it has a raid build in. If i cannot raid it with my mobo. what kind of option do i have? Should i buy a pci raid card, if so, which one would you recommend(newegg link would b good) I have a limited budget around no more than $50 if that will give me anything.

second question, how to raid0 the drive? please send me link or tell me how to create it raid0 and install window 7 64bits on it.
thank you,
Magicbullet

 

[dglad4]

The ICH7 does not have RAID AT ALL, thats why i bought a new mobo, i HAD a ICH7 but now own an ICH10R (NOTE that the 'R' indicates 'RAID')

I haven't even used the RAID yet but planning on a stripe (RAID0) of 2x 500GB drives.

I'm not entirely sure about a card to suggest but i have heard that the Promise FastTrack are popular and good chips, but watchout which card manufacturer you get it from, i bough a Promise chip on a Ritmo card and only 1 out of 4 ports worked! mind you i was being REALLY cheap to get SATA on an old Pentium 4 (paid $10AU).

PS: If you REALLY want or need the RAID, you might need to buy a controller card. they are about $50AU (i dunno how much $US) and slot into your PCI-Ex1.0 lane. You could also look into software RAID but it will suck resources from your PC (it will use CPU for calculating and RAM for cache). I highly recommend hardware RAID as this is its own small computer to do this seperatly from the PC thus no performance sacrifice.

Good luck

 

[Deleted member 217926]

As stated above you have no RAID support on that MB. You can go with a PCI RAID card for pretty cheap ( ~$20 US ) on newegg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000410%201193212547&Description=pci%20raid&name=SATA&ActiveSearchResult=True scroll down.

I have not run one in years so I cant really recommend a specific one but I would stick with a Silicon Image chip over VIA.

I really hope you didnt pay much for those old Raptors as the current generation of 7200rpm drives are faster and much larger making them obsolete.

If you buy a RAID card it will prompt you to create the array when you boot up with it the first time.

RAID 0 has no redundancy and will lose ALL data on the array if there are ANY problems. If you do run one make SURE you back up to another drive regularly.

 

[jitpublisher]

Oh, surely you didn't, why oh why did you buy those old things, they are not even SATA II drives!
You could have bought a single WD Black 640gig drive for less money, and it would have given you better overall performance and 4 times the storage space than those 2 outdated Raptors...They are even rebuilds!

If you buy a controller card, and put them in RAID, well first off, they aren't going to "wow" you all that much.
Second, make sure you run a good backup. You will have problems and you will lose your data at some point if you do not.

 

[magicbullet]

OMG............ i can't believe i bought it. I really thought these raptors would boost my hdd speed, but it hardly does any improvement to my computer as i'm using Samsung F2 spinpoint. Plus, I paid $40 each for 74GBs which is a very bad price/space ration. i think i'm going to return it. what do you think?

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey