Sorry Qumahlin, but I ten d to dis agrre on this...
If chosing between software raid (striping) and a raid controller, which I found out is not true raid but actual software based itself, just done on card... I would go software...
When I first found out about the software raid that dynamic disks offered I jumped and tried it... If I remember correctly I had my OS on a 15g, a 30g and a 10g,,, That gave a stripped drive of 20g and an "extra" 20g dynamic drive... At one point I bought a Promise Ultra 100 to connect the drives to...
Back then I must admit that I did'nt keep very good backups and often had to reinstall Win2k Pro... All I ever had to do was import the foreign disk to get the drives working... Losing data is losing data... When I converted the Ultra to a Fastrack100 I actualy had more problems the biggest was data corruption from not having the sectors correct... I lost 20g through the hardware and when I lost the 10g drive I lost all the info on both drives... If the utmost in reliability is need then stripping, of anykind is not a good idea...
The perfomance of a raid drive is NOT noticable unless your doing heavy graphic work and use it for your scratch file of whatever,,, And you BETTER do backups to a non-stripped drive... Don't even think of keeping your 10g of music there... for the newbies...
MrBreaker, The dynamic drives mention are a way to get software based raid from Win2k and WinXp... It allows the OS to have more control over the drive... There are really two different things... Win2k did'nt support installing the OS on a DD even though I was able to work around it once,,, don't remember how though... And yes you can make any drive anything you want with DD... You can make one stripped, one spanned and 2 regular or any combination as long as you have room...