Raid

Not sure where to put this topic in.

I have 3 HDD's, primary 1TB. The 2nd and 3rd drives are both seagate 320 GB and use those just for extra storage. My thought process is to have the two 320 GB HDD's set up in raid 0 and still have/use my primary HDD. Is this possible. I did a preliminary run of the extra drives in raid 0 (successfully) but upon reboot my primary drive was no where to be seen. So obviously I did some thing wrong along the way. Does anybody have an idea as to how to go about this or that has done this kind of set up.

Have you consulted your motherboard's manual on RAID configuration? I 'believe' that RAID is setup as a 'primary'. But I'm not sure.

Do you want to use it as the OS boot drive setup?

Here's a decent article, not too techy though. But good info at least.

How to Set Up RAID on Your PC

since the move to new place...I can't find my manual. I did download it from Asus but there's no detialed information on it. It just list that it's RAID ready and the different RAID configurations.

I want the primary drive (non raid) as OS boot drive, and be able to raid the other 2 drives just for storage.

I'll give it a good read.

Thanks Nibs

I wouldn't recommend RAIDing the drives just for storage. If either one failed, you would lose everything on both drives. The small performance boost just isn't worth it in that scenario, since your OS is on a different drive entirely.

I don't understand this. The whole purpose of Redundant HDs is so that both have exactly the same information at all times so that if one fails the other still has the information.

That's RAID1, which mirrors all data from drive A to drive B. OP was asking about RAID0, which splits all data between two drives, meaning if one drive crashes, you just irretrievably lost half the information for every single file on your RAID array.

RAID0 is only advisable when you have another non-RAIDed disk with enough storage to hold a copy of everything you want to back up from the array.

Bass why would you want to span the drives like Thrax is saying? Sounds likes it's a much bigger risk just to save a drive letter. Is it that much harder to treat them as separate drives and store some data on D: and some on E: ?

Not that I'm going to or really want to, just wanted to know if it was possible to set it up with raid 0 and a non raid drives is all.

Aye, I should've made the distinction clear between RAID 0 and RAID 1 in my initial post. RAID 1 would make sense for backup purposes.

Bassfisher, to answer your question, yes it is possible. The only issue is when you select RAID in your BIOS, all drives connected to that controller will run in RAID or AHCI mode. So if the hard drive that your OS install is on was using "IDE" mode, it'll break it. If it was running in AHCI to begin with then there's no problem.

Secondly, it is worth noting that most motherboards come with multiple SATA controllers on them. Which means it's possible to set one or more controllers to RAID mode, but put the non-RAID'd hard drives onto a separate controller entirely. This is especially useful if the OS installation was done with the SATA port configured in "IDE" control mode.

I'd need more information to follow you... "no where to be seen" in the BIOS, do you mean? That's typical when using RAID, but it should still show up within the boot menu options regardless.