OFcGaming

Thinking of setting up a raid system with two 'Hitachi Deskstar 2TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM' drives, BUT have little experience with setting this up. I know my motherboard etc supports it all and want to use it with Windows 7.

Any advice out there?

Its actually quite simple once you do it a few times, so I know what you mean if you havent done it before.

Its all pretty much done ( depending on your mainboard ) from a setting just after the bios. Some call it a RAID Utility which is a secondary option when you boot the PC. You basically add the drives to your bios, then later run the raid utility and set each drive to the RAID type you want. (usually moving them left to right in the window boxes - again, depending on your mainboard and utiluty type). Then run your install of OS. It "should" detect it without the need of any drivers, most newer boards dont need the 3rd party raid driver anymore...

To save myself lots of quotes etc... the best answer is to google it and have a read up on some basics, but the real question you want to ask yourself is what type of RAID you want and why.

Ive seen performance increased with ( RAID 0 ) Striping the drives ( 2 drives become 1 big drive ) but you wont really notice it unless your rendering images or video editing or music sequencing, but its nice to have one massive drive. On the other hand, ( RAID 1 ) Mirroring is extremely useful. You have basically a backup of the drives should one HD fail.

Well im looking at RAID 1 for the backup purposes but a bit worried about the thrashing as I do render a lot of raw video around 2gig in size down to 300meg in FLV format.

Anyhow looks a thing to try while upgrading to Win7