A Few Quick Raid Question.. Please =:)

T

ThePunkerGuy

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Ok, I am about to setup Raid 0 with my onboard raid controller and 2 40gig western digital 7200 ATA100 hard drives. I just have a few question that i know most anyone who has setup raid could tell me. Ok.. before i put the drives on raid what should i do to them.. do they need to have any partitions at all (even primary dos partition?) or do i delete every single partition off? I had this problem last time.. I setup the drives and setup the raid bios and when the computer booted and detected the raid array it saied it was 76gig.. normal.. but when i went in fdisk and put a partition and formated the drive it only formated as a 10gig! Whats up with that? I think i may have not taked my old fat32 partition and files off one of the drives first.. is that what did it? And the other question is when i go to install windows xp do i need to do that thing where i press F5 while its loading the setup and install a raid driver, or will it do it by itself? If i do.. could someone send me a link to the correct raid driver.. i have the Asus A7V266-E with the onboard Promise Raid.. the Lite thing. Thanks!!
- Mike
 
Originally posted by ThePunkerGuy
I setup the drives and setup the raid bios and when the computer booted and detected the raid array it saied it was 76gig.. normal.. but when i went in fdisk and put a partition and formated the drive it only formated as a 10gig! Whats up with that?
- Mike

I think the reason that it only shows as 10 gig is that DOS uses a 4 digit hexidecimal calculator, and the maximum that goes to is EEEE which equates to 16x16x16x16 = 65,536.
So the 10 that its showing is the differnce between the actual drive size and 65,536 .

I only know cos me and a mate installed an 80 gig drive the other week on his new system (he actually bought 4 x 80gig 7200rpm Maxtor ATA133 drives the lunatic) and it freaked us out as well.

Hope you got it installed OK :D
 
to answer your questions, the drives which will be in the raid array should have no partitions on them. once you set up the array, then you partition your mega drive and format it.

as far as raid drivers during installation, you will only need them if your c: (boot) drive will be on the raid controller. the driver you will need should have came on a floppy with your mobo. check the box.

rule #1) it isn't recommended that you put your c: (boot) drive on an array as arrays aren't super-reliable.

rule #2) an array should only exist between two master devices on their own channel with no slaves present. that means with a 2-channel raid controller, you should have one harddrive master on the 1st raid channel and the other master of the 2nd and there should be nothing else hooked up to those channels. only then will you get the performance increase that a raid stripe promises.

ideally, you want a single harddrive (c:) for your winxp on ide1 or ide 2 for security... then 2 harddrives, each on ide3 and ide4 in an array (d:) for performance.
 

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