RAID questions

[Demos_sav]

NOOB question coming...

How do you use RAID? A drawing would be perfect:o

[DanTheBanjoman]

A drawing?

How about telling is what it is you want to accomplish and what hardware/software you're using? Do you have some high end hardware RAID controller, some cheap onboard software one or do you want to use Windows to set it up?

[Demos_sav]

My motherboard has the ICH-7R chipset but I don't know if it has an onboard RAID controller. I don't know what methods are there for using RAID, WHAT'S THE BEST?

I said drawing because I didn't know how you connect 2 drives in RAID. I do know though how to connect 2 diff drives

[DanTheBanjoman]

Well, it does not matter how you connect them. As long as they're on the same controller.

The best solution is hardware RAID, which has a dedicated processor and of course SCSI is strongest here. However I take it that's not an option.
If you want to know if your motherboard supports it (onboard controllers are software solutions, they rely on the CPU) look in the manual.

With only 2 drives the only options are RAID 0 and RAID 1, RAID 0 stripes data and shares it between the 2 drives which doubles (theoretically, there is some overhead obviously) transfer speeds. RAID 1 mirrors the first drive to the second. It effectively makes you a happy person when your harddrive crashes since the second drive contains the same data.

Though if you don't know what exactly RAID does and haven't done some reading on it I wouldn't recommend using it. It's not that it's badly needed.

[tigger]

http://img.techpowerup.org/070118/untitled.jpg

like this for raid 0 or 1

i had the ich7r on my last board,raid 0 is the most common for speed.you connect the drives the same for raid 1 data security.
the controller suports a few other modes too,5,10,jbod(just a bunch of drives)

raid will work best with MATCHED drives.you can do it with unmatched ones,but i tried it and had problems.

hope this helps.

[Demos_sav]

Thank you all:toast: