Question About Raid Set Up

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Whirlwind

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I am going to be doing another gaming build shortly, and I have a question about the Raid set up.

P5W DH Deluxe mobo and it has an easy raid set up, set the jumper on mobo to the raid set up that you want. {I want Raid 0 Data Striping}

So I need two identical harddrives.

My question is when i install windows, will it put windows on both drives, or just one drive, or do I need another drive for windows?

Will it put windows on both drives and then just recongnize them as one drive? I mean I need the exact same amount of space on both hard drives, correct?

I hope I am making sense.

Also, will this help my performance in a gaming pc or not?

Thanks much for any help.
 
Yes, you need two identical drive.

Window files will be divided between the 2 drives, but it acts just like 1 drive.

It will help the load times on games.
 
So I just hook up drives in ez raid ports on mobo....set the jumpers....load windows and anything else i want on the drives and it just reads the drives as 1 drive....correct?

Can i partion the drives in 3 parts still?

Thanks for your help.
 
you need to install the RAID drivers by pressing F6 when windows says "Press F6 to install RAID or SCSI drivers" during install. don't quote me on the message :p that's from memory but it should be close enough for you to recognise the message. after that you should be able to partition the RAID as if it were a normal disk.
 
Thanks for the help guys.

Do you guys think it is worth it to go raid striping for gaming, or am i just sort of wasting a hard drive doing that?

I'm just so undecided about this....whether quicker load times are worth it or not?

Is that the only benefit in gaming?
 
Striping doesnt waste any drive space, as all of it is accessible. Software Raid0 usually will net around 10% improvement overall, but YMMV. Hardware raid will give substantially more , with less cpu overhead utilized.
BTW if you happen to have 2 drives that are NOT identical, can still work, however it will only access the sum of the the smallest drive doubled. IE a 40g and 30g together will work, but raid0 will only see 60 gb(30+30). Cache size doesnt really matter either, but most people do use 2 identical size drives. They can be different maufacturers...
 
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