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Please Help me Setup RAID for the first time

Last response: in Storage
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Hello everyone! So here is the scoop, tomorrow I am going to be hooking up two hard drives into a RAID 0 configuration! Hurray! On a side note I will also be hooking up an sata cd/dvd burner. After the setup, I will be installing Windows 7 Home x64.

For a motherboard I have a GA-MA790FXT-UD5P. This mobo has two sata2 controllers with raid support. I can use either one for RAID 0. One is called Gigabyte SATA2 and the other is SB750. The HD's are two WD 500gb blacks. The optic drive is an DVD BURNER HP | 1270I LS SATA R.

Here are some questions I have:

1. Which of these controllers should I use for my array?

2. Should I put my optic drive on the same controller as my array, or on a seperate one?

3. What Stripe size should I use? What cache mode?

4. Any other issues I haven't thought of that you could point out to me?

Thanks for reading my post!

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connect the drives to SB750. Set stripe size to the default and use cache setting on or whatever AMD calls it. You can connect the DVD drive to wherever you want. The only issue I can think of is that your RAID 0 will not be much faster than the single drive but you have a higher chance of data loss. Make sure you setup the RAID volume before you install windows. Good luck.

I don't understand why it wont be any faster than a single drive, if both drives are accessing the same data at the same time, seems like it would be almost twice as fast to me.

Best solution

If that RAID 0 array isnt a lot faster, I will be surprised. It will deliver close to 2X the read/write speeds of a single drive. I have run RAID 0 for years without a single loss.

But, since it CAN happen, always keep a backup of files you cannot afford to lose.

1. either
2. Doesnt matter - I have done both.
3. Stripe size - most say go for the largest which is usually 128k. Do 128k or 64k. You pick.
4. Quit over analyzing and get on with it. Seriously, these things return so much performance for just doing it. Do keep backups of important files in case you are one of the few who's RAID array fails.

Go have some fun
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