Asus P4C800-E Deluxe and RAID config question

[tantone]

I'd like to have RAID 0 configured on the SATA ports for the sheer speed, so I'm getting 2 80GB SATA drives for that purpose.

Now, what I'd like to do is keep my current 30GB ATA100 HDD and put that on the Pri IDE controller as master, that way I can use the standard XP pro backup utility to schedule backups of critical data to the 30GB drive from the RAID0 array.

The reason I'm asking this is because the manual is kinda hard to follow on the RAID configs. Will the above setup work as I hope it will?

Thanks!

[BipolarBill]

It all depends on which drive you set as the boot drive in the boot sequence. I would remove the odd drive, install to the array and then add the drive back.

[tantone]

The RAID0 array will be the boot drive. I've read that I should remove all drives except for the boot drives while I install XP so that I don't get confused by XP's rather cryptic labelling of the drives when it comes time to format them during the install. I'll add the PATA drive after the install to avoid this.

I just wanted to verify that my setup will as I intend it to--I need some sort of redundancy. I'm leery of a RAID0 array since it's just doubling the chances that you'll lose your data.

Thanks!

[BipolarBill]

There are no assurances. We makes our choices and takes our chances.

Your proposed setup is perfectly viable. Just be sure to exclude the BIOS for looking for boot devices other than the selected ones.

[Midknyte]

are you sure that you need RAID0?

http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0&PHPSESSID=87f1173f86615e7873513a33598babcd

[tantone]

I ordered the parts the other day and they'll be here tomorrow. Included was only one 80GB Seagate SATA drive. I decided to skip the RAID0 config for now.

That was a really good link Midknyte. Seems almost like it's just a way to say "I can read data faster than you," and even then it's nothing more than a technicality.

RAID0 would only really be useful in a server requiring constant drive access (like a file server), and that's when RAID5 is best anyway.

[Senko]

If you install XP (presumably from a CD) and then add the ATA drive in later, the CD will have a different drive letter. Drive lettering is as follows - boot partition, other primary partitions, secondary partitions, other devices (CDs, etc).

The problem you may have is that the drive letter of the install CD is stored in the register. After you add the ATA drive, it will no longer point to the CD, but the ATA drive. You can change the drive letter back, but then the ATA drive will have to be something other than D:

[tantone]

I didn't partition anything.

Also, you can either 1) manually change the install path in the registry or 2) just tell it where to look the next time it requires those files (like copy the i386 dir over to the root of C: and slipstream it with the SP1a files for easier future updating).