question about RAID

[lazer_viking]

Christmas is coming up and I'm thinking about getting a couple of raptors for my gaming rig as the next upgrade (along with an 8800 GTX water-cooled edition ). With a couple of raptors I can put it in a RAID 0 config for higher performance, no? What I'm wondering is if I have to buy a RAID controller or if my mother board has one built it. What makes me think this is because every time I boot my computer it says something like "Press F7 to load RAID drivers" or something. I can't really remember. My mobo is a DFI lanparty nf4 UT expert. On a specification sheet it says this:

Serial ATA with RAID


# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the nForce4 SLI chip - SATA speed up to 3Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD - NVIDIA RAID allows RAID arrays spanning across Serial ATA and Parallel ATA
# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip - SATA speed up to 1.5Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5

I don't know what a lot of this means, but I'm lead to believe that on some mobo chip there is built in support for RAID.
I'm getting two of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136054 I've picked low capacity because of the price, and there are two of them anyway so it's actually 72 GB not 36 GB even when in RAID 0 (right?). I will still have my 180 GB hard drive which is what I call high capacity, even though by today's standards it's nothing.
If my mobo doesn't have a raid controller built on, what is a good one to with in an affordable price range? I have no idea how much one can cost, but I was hoping no not spend more than $70-80?
Also, in RAID 0 the OS actually sees the two drives as one correct? For example, I will have three hard drives... ahh screw it I can spend 5 minutes in photoshop and make a diagram thats more clear and less time consuming for all of us.

So that's correct right? So, for stuff like movies, music, pictures, crappy games (ie diablo 2, starcraft, halo 1), etc can go on C:\. New games (Everquest 2........ thats all I can think of right now LOL) can go on drive D:\ for the added performance, right? Oh, and the OS can go on drive D:\.
Any comments/feedback is appreciated. Tell me if I'm totally lost or not lol.

edit: woot I procced intellitxt three times. go advertisements!!

 

[krazefinn]

Striped raid will provide maximum space, but is not "datasafe".

Sonds like you have an onboard Raid of some type, although that will NEVER approach the speed or data security a pci-HARDWARE raid card will. But they cost 3-4X as much as the 30-50$ software pci cards.

Might just be semantics, but I'd put the array as" C" with the OS, and use the big drive as "d".

 

[lazer_viking]

can you suggest a pci-hardware controller?

 

[cwiz]

ive set my raptors up in RAID 0... its not that tough. there should be a 3.5" disk that says like nVidia RAID controller drivers that came w/ your mobo... mine did. anyway... when you install windows, at the begininning it says to press like F4 or something to install 3rd party RAID controller... thats what your want to do. install the drivers from the 3.5 disk and then it should set your hdd's up in raid 0. and yes, your computer will see one 72GB disk. and yes, it is bloody fast. from when i hit the power button, it is about 19 seconds till windows is done loading and good to go.

 

[darkop16]

my raid controllers came on the driver disk, and i had to make a raid driver floppy disk on another computer to install it on my rig before i could install the os on it. Your mobo might be different since it is dfi. Check your mobo manuel, it should have instructions on how to set up a raid configuration.

The hardware raid controllers are expensive but the mobo's cnotroller should be fine. You'll see a little increase in load time with the raptors in raid 0 too.

Also, when you set up the raid 0, i would set it to 32kb for the stripe size since its not going to big and your going to use it for the os and games(i presume).

32 kb=os/games installstion use
64kb=data/ os/games installtion use (thats what i use myn for)
higher=data use/maybe with os if all you were going ot use the comp for was data storage

 

[cwiz]

yeah, my boot time increased too cuz it sits at the RAID -check screen for like 2-4 seconds its worth it though!

 

[lazer_viking]

sooo about this stripe size. i can see where the smaller stripe size would be higher performance because like if it needed a 1024kb piece of data, with 32kb stripe size there is a greater chance of it being evenly distributed over the two drives, is this correct?
and yea i have the floppies and stuff for the raid but alas, no floppy drive. will a usb one work? the usb one always gets seen as drive B:\ for some reason, but thats something to work out at a later date when i get closer to actually getting my drives.

 

[cwiz]

you dont have a floppy in an old pc or something? thats what i had to do... 3.5" is so 1987... anyway, i dont think a flash drive will work cuz you install the drivers when you reinstall windows... i think you need xp installed to read jump drives like a normal drive.

 

[krazefinn]

Might have to slipstream the drivers into windows install disc...also, doesnt XP already contain drivers for most raid setups? I cant remember if I had to(I know I did the f6 sata drivers), but I think the raid drivers were on mobo install disc, and if I recall the raid setup was essentiallly "automatic", just choose to build it when prompted, choose custom to set chunks (research that well, it can hurt more than help..), choose type, and voila, it was ready to go.

 

[lazer_viking]

if xp disc contains it, doesnt that mean that its software based raid? ive heard that those arent any good... i dont mind buying a good controller if it offers better performance. and also, i dont know how to slipstream a driver into the install disc :\