RAID Setup

[morrty]

First time I am installing a RAID array. Bought 2x 500gb identical hard drives and I have a question before I continue.

I setup the raid in the bios and the raid utility before I install windows. Its a Stripped Array (RAID-0)

Question is:

Do I need to install the driver during windows installation if windows already recognizes the raid array without the driver?

 

[Hefemeister]

You should not need to if Windows can see it and install to it during the install phase. You will know when it is time to pick the drive you want to install on if it sees it or not. If it does not just start over with the drivers. Make sure and have backups of anything important on that array. One drive failure means all data gone. The chance of a drive failure is small but with 2 drives you double that chance.

 

[Nagasama]

especially if they are identical and purchased at the same time.
are you sure you want to use RAID 0?

 

[Lexluethar]

The only reason to install a 3rd party driver (pressing F6 during windows installation) is if you are installing these drives on windows XP AND they are SATA. XP does not support SATA natively so if you want the benefits of the extra speed of SATA you will need to install those drivers during the windows installation.

Your SATA drive will probably still be detected because most drives will emulate the IDE environment so that they still work with XP and other OS's that don't support SATA.

In order to have the SATA speed you will need to enable the AHCI and enable RAID, then copy the five or so files needed for the installation onto a floppy. At that point install windows and press F6 during installation, point it to the A drive and it should start to install the proper SATA drives.

If you have Vista you don't need to worry about any of this as it natively supports SATA.