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Raid 0 newbie

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Hi, Just got windows 7 and purchased two samsung spinpoint f3 500 gig harddrives. I am wanting to put them in raid 0. This is my first time doing raid and I know little about actually physically doing it. My motherboard is a gigabyte ma 790xt-ud4p, http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Sp.... From what I read in my motherboard manual, I'm good to go right? I don't need anything else besides the two drives?

Now I did an install of windows 7 on one of the spinpoints, to get normal hdd benchmarking numbers written down.
Do I need to format this drive before I do the raid setup? Do I need to format the other, blank spinpoint?

I notice I have Gsata connections. Are these the things I should be using for the raid? Also...when looking through the manual I see that I'm going to be queried for "block size", ranging from 4KB to 128KB. What should I choose?

I also get the idea that after I set up the raid, in the windows 7 installation, I'm going to have to load some drivers? These should be on the motherboard disk? Or should I be getting newer drivers and putting them on perhaps a thumb drive?

If anyone has any suggestions or advice I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

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There are regular SATA ports on your motherboard... then there are the ones ran by a seperate Controller (usually 4+ SATA pors together). If not using RAID, you would install the HDDs on the motherboard non-RAID ports. If using RAID, then you would enable RAID controller and plug your HDDs (must be identical) into that portion of the motherboard that contains the SATA ports... in your case, I believe 6 SATA ports are all together. You will have to do some little research as far as setting up your controller utility, usually its a clear config, setup config (raid0, 64/128kb, striped, etc), make logical drives, and save.

In my case, I have yet to need any drivers for any of my raids, or sata drives in that case... you should be able to not require any drivers on W7 for your raid0 project. You can do a quick test... just backup your computer, turn off computer and plug in to your SATA Controller ports (enable them too), and recover the backup but on the SATA controller ports/raid.
 
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