Raid 0 setup help (1 Viewer)

[Len Cheong]

Has anybody ever set up a raid 0 hard drive configuration?
I've placed my 2nd drive in and I don't know what to do next. I have onboard raid (motherboard is 875p) and supposedly, I don't have to reformat my hard drive and can do it "on the fly."

 

[Patrick Sun]

Have you read the motherboard manual? Or perused the BIOS options?

 

[Tom_J]

RAID-0 in this case will be configured in your motherboard BIOS. You'll have to define the array, and since you're doing raid-0 (striped-no redundancy), you'll have to start your array from scratch.

Once you have the array defined in the BIOS(1+1 array) install your OS of choice.

 

[Len Cheong]

I entered the bios and went into the advanced options. I then went to IDE configurations and then enabled the RAID 0 configuration then exited. My computer rebooted and then it detected the onboard controller and installed the raid software automatically then rebooted again. Now, I don't know if the raid 0 setup is actually kicking in. Is there a system check I can do? Some hard drive test?

I was amazed how easy it was. I thought my old hard drive had to copy data onto the 2nd new hard drive but this never happened. Plus, no reinstalling of OS. Is this possible?

 

[Patrick Sun]

You may have Raid 1 mixed up with Raid 0. IIRC, Raid 1 will have to copy over the data before it's fianlly set up for use (because it mirrors that data on each hard drive), while Raid 0 combines the capacity of the 2 drives so the operating system sees one big drive, thus no copying of the data.

 

[Tekara]

well, easiest way to see if the raid implementation was successful is to go to my computer right click on the main drive (usually c. Select properties and look at the total capacity; if it is double that of either single drive your in RAID0 if it's the same size as one of the harddrives you are either in RAID1 or were unsuccessful in implementing the RAID solution.

 

[Tekara]

oh also, make sure both hard drives are plugged into the raid enabled IDE ports on your motherboard. there is typically four IDE ports on raid enabled motherboards, two are standard IDE ports and two are for RAID solutions.

they are typically different in colour, you can check your motherboards manual to determine which ports are for setting up RAID solutions.

 

[Len Cheong]

Ok an update. I did not have raid setup since the hard drive was still reading half of what it should be. So, I spent the better part of a night reformatting the hard drive after I assigned both drives to a raid 0 volume and enabling RAID technology on my BIOS. I then installed Windows XP + the intel raid accelerator software which came included in my applications disc.

Frankly speaking, I did it and I don't even know how because my computer was giving me worrisome messages along the way like "disk error" whenenver I rebooted. The hard drive now reads the correct doubled volume and when i did a linear read test it was 100+ MB/sec vs 50+ MB/sec earlier without RAID.

Thanks for all the help.