Raid questions: WindowsXP software & 3 hard drives

[ThePooBurner]

I read the raid 5 artical the other day on toms. I didn't know that windows had inbuilt raid capability like that. I was wondering how well it works in Riad 0 and 1 modes. The aretical showed raid 5, but i don't really want to do that. a more simple setup would be fine. So question 1) how good is the windows software raid? does it offer any preformance advantage over a normal setup for gaming and such?

Second issue: I have 3 hard drives. 260gig and 1 120gig. I would like to raid0 the first 2 and mirror them onto the 120 for security purposes (just plain data, no parity stuffs or striping stuff). Is that possible? If it is possible, what is the best way to go about doing it? Could it work without buying a controller card and using the windows software raid?

I think you see where i want to go with this. Any help will be appreaciated. Thanks in advance.

-ThePooBurner

 

[RichPLS]

It might work, but I would suspect that you would have to partition the 120 into 2 60's giving you essentially 4 x 60
Then you could do 2 RAID 0's and use one for Redundancy, but there would be a performance hit because of the partitioned drive would have to transfer 2 drives worth of data onto one drives data stream.

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[Crashman]

first of all, if you RAID0 the first two and mirror them to the third, you'll be limitted in speed to the third. What you're speaking of is a special configuration for RAID 0+1. I don't think Windows has the power to do such odd configurations, and even then I don't think you can do a Windows RAID with the boot drive.

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[jihiggs]

im fairly certain that windows wont let you do any kind of raid with the boot drive.

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[jon_west_uk]

Everytime i try to make XP start from a raid drive the pc goes mental and wont start up properly. For now i just have an IDE drive as a startup drive and the raid for files progs etc.

Someone please unwire me...the gadgets are taking over!