RAID0 Questions

[The Cow King]

Hey, looking for help here, hope I get a quick answer before my HD of choice goes out of stock.

I currently have a 500 gb seagate barracuda, I'm thinking about getting a 2nd HD for RAID0.

As far as I've understood it, there's no point for me to get another drive that's bigger than 500 gigs because in raid it's reduced to 500 GB because my barracuda is 500 GB. Correct?

I'm thinking about getting a Western Digital Caviar Black 500 GB as the 2nd HD. This should work right? Or should I get another identical 500 GB barracuda?

Also when I put them in RAID0, I will have to reinstall windows because I lose all data on the 1st HD, correct?

And last thing, my motherboard is Asus Rampage Formula, do I need some kind of raid controller or some such? I hope not.

I read on the FAQ I need raid drivers, where can I download these, or are they usually on the motherboard cd? I also don't have a floppy drive, can I use an usb stick instead? (I'm on windows vista btw - is it true it auto-recognizes the raid array?)

Finally, when choosing the RAID capacity when actually creating the RAID, is this the same thing as partitioning a single HD? Or do I get to partition the HD's later on in the process? I don't want a single 1k GB partition.

Thanks for help.

 

[Sphinx4311]

Yes, your better off getting the same size hard drive because RAID will only recognize the lowest size hard drive. From what I have been told you can mix and match brands for RAID but its best to have the exact same hard drive. Hope that helps.

 

[RetiredChief]

On partitioning: Yes you can partition it and there are two methods.

(1) the most common is to setup the stripe using the whole drive and then partition it during the install (select custom install) and set up your partitions, or you can just setup the 1st partition for the operating system and then once you have vista installed use disk manager to set up the rest of the partitions. NOTE Vista will report that you have one HDD.

(2) the method I like is one you set up the raid 0 stripe, Specify to setup the stripe on say 100 gig -> 200 gigs ( this will become drive 0) then select the remainder of the drive for your 2nd stripe, This will become drive 1. Install vista on drive 0. (Note Vista will treat this as if you had two HDD. After installing Vista on drive 0, then go into Disk magament and partition drive 1. This method is very similar to what is refered to as short stroke which is used to improve disk performance. In true short stroke, only the first stripe setup is used, and the remaining 80% of the drive is left unused.

As to drivers, I know win 7 did not ask for drivers. Don't remember if it did with vista (don't think it did - I have the Gigabyte P965-DQ6 (Vista) and the Gigabyte P55-UD4P for Win 7.