Im trying to set up my drives in a R0 array.

2x320gb sata drives.

I set it up in the bios then I made a winxp cd with the raid drivers on and started installing. I pressed f6 and then later it says oi I dunno wot these drives are, have you got a disk? I was like no, thinking the drivers were on the disk and would be installed later. They was (as far as I can tell - VIAMRAID or something).

So it was happy but then on the formatting page it came up as ~600gb. Is it seeing the disks as a JBOD? I was expecting it to show as ~30-0gb.


edit: I think Im being stupid.

RAID 0 is Striped so you will get ~600GB

Im thinking you wanted RAID 1 which is mirrored.


Edit: P.S. Ive said it once and Ill say it again - RAID 0 on a home workstation is a stupid idea

I was being dozy, yeah I wanted RAID 0 rather than 1, my brain is a bit pickled atm. I used nlite to slip the raid drivers on an XP disk.. which mostly worked.

I got a 200gb Maxtor drive as a file backup and a 80gb WD drive for important backups of backups so I think im ok. Touch wood.


87mb/s drive index with Sandra - I think thats in the right ballpark so it seems to be cool.

Ive got a 4 drive 250GB Hitachi RAID 0 setup.  Using HDTach I was getting in the region of 170mb/s on the outer parts of the disks and 120mb/s on the inner parts.

Setup the "drive" with 64k blocks and 16k stripe size, so every block is evenly split across the 4 drives.

Im struggling to believe those figures, are they cached/uncached ?

My RAID1 setup gives me around 80MB/s raw read speed and 300 MB/s cached..

RAID 1 will generally be faster for reads than RAID 0 since most RAID 1 algorithms will all reading in parallel from different disks

thats what I get with 5 x 80gig drives running sata2 in raid 0

but low for me too I think ?

going to reinstall with xp64bit soon, will re do it then and see if it makes any difference ?

EDIT. p.s. cornet, I edited this post when I realised I was looking at the wrong numbers and talking balls!