Creating a RAID 0 on an existing system

ryankrewer13

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Dec 20, 2009
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Hello, im looking to add a RAID 0 to my existing system for video capture and editing.
My setup right now:
1 small HDD for my OS (Win Xp 32)
1 Raptor for Games/ video editing
1 500gb for storage
Iam looking to add the RAID 0 as two new drives and eventually do away with the aging raptor drive. I was wondering if this was possible to do and if a procedure exists for it. ive tried a few of the things in this forum but i cant seem to get it to work the way i want.

Also, upon further digging it seems when i set up my system my drives were set as IDE instead of SATA i assume this hinders performance...Any way to change that aswell?
On a side note im trying to do this without reinstalling my OS if thats even possible.
 

ryankrewer13

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ill disregard that last post, and answer the first. Ive already attached the drives formatted them and enabled the RAID in the BIOS, restarted, hit CTRL- I and set up the array on the 2 new disks. Restarted and the OS wouldnt load because the BIOS setting labeled all the disks as RAID. I tried the prcdure in this thread http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246398-32-install-raid-driver-installed but the OP was pretty vague on how he got his to work. I also tried one of the replies to that thread which was this http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196922-32-switching-storage-controllers-reinstalling-windows but the directions there werent exactly for what im trying to do.
 

ryankrewer13

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And to clarify.. I would like to leave my current disks as is. Add a RAID 0 with 2 new HDDs specificaly for video capture/editing/rendering. BUT if i can do this AND change the state of the other drives from IDE to SATA (if im not mistaken it would help those disks perform better) aswell, then id like to learn how to that.
 

staats

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You should be able to add a raid with no problems. As long as you are not changing your boot drive, you can do it with some integrated raid and nearly all true hardware raid solutions. I just added a RAID card to my machine and didn't do a thing to the OS. I ensured the card I purchased was supported my OS with no driver.
 

ryankrewer13

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well that really doesnt help me..i assume its easy, but i dont know how to do it which is why i made the post. Im going for software RAID here because ive seen that its better than hardware RAID also.
 

staats

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You may be able to - I never used software raid with Windows XP. If it is anything like setting up a software raid in windows 7, you will not have a problem. I was able to do that with no issues.
 

wmp

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Software RAID 0 better than hardware? Is it? I have been using raid cards for so long it never occurred to me to actually do a feature comparison. Silly me!

I'm not sure that MS XP will allow you to set up a software RAID at all, if by software raid you mean using the MMC Disk Administrator snap-in to manage some disks and volume sets. This Microsoft article forbids it for Raid 1 and Raid 5. Makes me doubt it will support Raid 0 either. I'm not a fan of Raid 0 anyway.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

You cannot create mirrored volumes or RAID-5 volumes on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition-based computers.