Absolute RAID Confusion

[Guest]

I am having my first experience with RAID. I just bought a Gigabyte GA-7VRXP. If you never had any experience w/ RAID, you'll hate the instruction manual- little direction. I have several questions that I haven't been able to find the answer to anywhere.

I want to setup a RAID 0 array w/ two WD 40 Gig 7200 rpm drives. In addition, I have a CD/RW and a DVD ROM.

There are 4 IDE channels (3 are green and the second one is white). The insrtuctions do say to plug you main HD into IDE one and CD ROM into IDE 2.

With 2 drives and two CD's, what do I plug in where? What gets daisy chained and what doesn't? When do install WindowsXP Pro and on which drive? When do I change my bios settings for RAID? When do I set up the array?

I've built many computers and this RAID has always interested me, but I've never had had a motherboard with onboard RAID. Perhaps with a better manual, I could have figured it out. I tried for about 5 hours last night. Time to get some help. Thanks.

 

[Crashman]

Set your board in BIOS to start off the RAID controller. Plug hard drive one into channel one of the RAID controller, and hard drive 2 into the second channel of the RAID controller. When you boot, as long as the RAID controller is enabled in BIOS, you'll see a very brief RAID settup prompt. Hit the keys as prompted and do the RAID settup from the new menu.

What to do with other drives, like CD? Put them on your non-RAID controller.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[siliconjon]

Yes, what he said. Check your manual to identify which two controllers are the RAID (often labelled on the MoBo as well). Plug each optical drive to it's own IDE [1&2] controller, and with each HD on it's own RAID/IDE [3 & 4] channel, you can set them up on RAID 0. This will give you the best performance increase, with the stiping, and all drives being on their own channel.


Kill a man, you're a murdered. Kill many and you're a conqueror. Kill them all, you're a GOD