A Raid Questions

[Tormoni]

I am somewhat fuzzy about what Raid is all about. I would like some info. I have heard that Raid will help improve performance and would like some input.

I am building my new system (sig) and the motherboard I have says it supports Sata RAID 0/1/0+1. I am purchasing the two hard drives you see in my sig and I'd like to know the best setup for the two drives as far as good gaming performance. Would Raid help me out or should I just leave them separate? If raid is the way to go, which raid do I go with and how do I go about setting it up??

Is raid something that gets set up at the same time you install windows? I know that in my bios you are to specify which drives are set up for raid, but nothing in the bios specifies what type of raid to use. My Mobo came with a floppy that says NvRaid Driver Disk, I am assuming this is used during the windows installation process.

Also, once windows is installed and I wish to add raid (if I haven't already) do I have to reformat or will it set up the drives itself?

Any input is appreciated...
Thanks again all,
Torm

 

[Yeti]

I am somewhat fuzzy about what Raid is all about. I would like some info. I have heard that Raid will help improve performance and would like some input.

Read the RAID 101 http://www.computerforum.com/showthread.php?t=10889

Would Raid help me out or should I just leave them separate? If raid is the way to go, which raid do I go with and how do I go about setting it up??

My personal opinion is you don't need to use RAID0. If you want it for better performance in gaming there are other less dangerous bottlenecks/available upgrades in the system you spec'd. If you're really paranoid about data loss, and not to concerned about having half the storage space, you could go with RAID1.

Is raid something that gets set up at the same time you install windows?

If it's RAID0, then yes. RAID1 you can set up in windows.

My Mobo came with a floppy that says NvRaid Driver Disk, I am assuming this is used during the windows installation process.

Yep

Also, once windows is installed and I wish to add raid (if I haven't already) do I have to reformat or will it set up the drives itself?

Again,depends on the RAID level.

 

[Tormoni]

Thanks for the Very fast response. I have read the Raid 101, and I noticed that with Raid 1, the read speed (theoretically) would be twice the speed, and write speed is the normal speed? Would this be better performance for gaming or not much noticable?

Also, if I do set up raid 1 and decide later on not to have them mirrored, it seems that it would be fairly easy to take the raid off and format the second drive and get my full amount of space from both drives, correct?

Or, If i decide not to use Raid at all, would it be better to just use one, larger, drive?

 

[Yeti]

Would this be better performance for gaming or not much noticable?

It might be a little better, but I doubt you would notice.

Also, if I do set up raid 1 and decide later on not to have them mirrored, it seems that it would be fairly easy to take the raid off and format the second drive and get my full amount of space from both drives, correct?

Yes

Or, If i decide not to use Raid at all, would it be better to just use one, larger, drive?

With the price of disk space these days, I prefer to have a smaller dedicated system disk and a few large storage drives. If you want to have one large drive you might want to look at one with 16 MB cache if you're concerned with performance.