raid

bigbondfan

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i have a 160gb ide hdd (wish i had gone for sata) and i want to use raid. i have a raid thing on my motherboard, enabled it in the cmos and set it up for striping. the only problem is, windows doens't load. it comes up with the screen saying that it didnt load properly last time, i chose either normal of safe mode, and then the computer restarts. any ideas on how to get raid working?
 
The reason why it's good to have matching drives is because of the striping feature. If your 40GB drive gets full but your other 160GB drive still has a lot of space, you will get an error everytime you write to it. What happens with RAID is that the data is broken up and split between two drives to make it fast.
 
RAID can work with any drive configuration... For example, you can create mirrored volumes (RAID-1) using two drives - A partition on the 40 GB drive can be mirrored onto the 160 GB drive or vice versa for redundency and fault tolerance. But you trade redundency and fault tolerance for less performance.

If you have stripped volumes (RAID-0), then you need to have two partitions (same size) on different drives. Although the fast performance, this configuration is not recommended since the risk of data being lost/corrupted is two times greater - increases with more drives.

There are more RAID configurations out there, but most home users use two HDs for RAID.

Common RAID configurations: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/DepKit/d1d1cb92-8221-4156-b6b3-13953ec50634.mspx
 
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