SATA Hard Drives

I am about to format my ATA hard drives (200gb & 40GB) & reinstall WinXP SP2. I have been given the chance to purchase 2 brand new SATA 10,000RPM Hard Drives for 25% of their retail value. My ASUS motherboard has the capability to support these drives in a Raid0 array. I have no experience with these drives & need some advice. Do I install WinXp on them? What about my games? Are there jumpers to set? How do i configure the jumpers on my 2 original Hard Drives? Is one a master & one a slave (like now)? Or, are they both now slaves? Are the SATA Drives now Drive C & Drive D? Or, are they seen as one drive in a Raid 0 array? Are my 2 Ata Drives now DriveE & DriveF or what? Any advice & help will be greatly appreciated. Thank You, Jughedd

 

I know the BIOS needs to be configured in order for windows to see them properly, this is different with each mobo ... and you need to have the SATA drivers on a floppy ,,, then hit F6 when it prompts you when windows loads it's drivers when installing ... and I don't know much about RAID

 

SATA does not use jumpers, I'd run the OS on the sata, 10,000 rpm I would skip the raid but that is up to you.
The sata would become C & D, with no raid set up. ( with Raid 0, C & the ata's would be D & E)
The other ata hdd's leave jumpered as they are, they would become E & F.
If you load the OS on the sata you will need to set in bios too boot from the sata before ata.
Windows setup,To load sata/raid drivers, boot order needs to be CD before SATA, once windows is installed set the SATA too boot first.
If you fail to load the sata drivers or load the wrong ones during windows install, your PC will not recognize the sata drives.

If you do run the OS on the sata, when you install windows disconnect the ata's till windows is installed.

Raid 0 is not a true raid setup, no fault tolerance
some raid info here:
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

Question: Your MOBO does have onboard SATA & supports Raid???
What model is it?

 

The mobo is ASUS P4P800 with bios update 1019 as of 11/23/04. I appreciate everybodys help - please excuse my delay in responding - I work long hours, have young children & have very limited time to read & respond - Thanx again everybody -J

 

Also- the bios supports SATA & Raid 0 (Not Raid 1) - itI just need to enable it.

 

That is a very good piece of advice. It makes life a LOT simpler...

Raid0 stands for Redundant array of inexpensive disks - 0. Its made 0 because its simple a way of compensating for the inherant decreace in data speed in raid1 (to make raid0+1). It is not "true RAID" because there is no redundancy. It simply stripes the data across two drives.

The anaolgy I tend to use is two packs of cards. Take two packs of cards, different colours, put them in 104 slots in order. Alternate the colours. There, you have a logical disk, in the raid0 format. Now, you seperate them, and you have two non-raided disks

But anyway, raid0 simply makes your I/O rate (theoretically) twice as fast. If it were me, I'd go for it.

I'm not sure about Asus boards, but Abit boards have a sub BIOS setup which loads with the chipset (after the POST finishes, a screen is presented saying "Press F6 for RAID configuration"). The MSI board I last used for raid had this in the BIOS setup. Check your manual.

 

Just want to add, nothing wrong with running raid setup.
I woundnt mind trying raid 0 with a couple 10,000 rpm Raptors.
If ya do raid, make sure ya back up anything important, more possibilities of things to go wrong be prepaired to reload windows.

 

I was gonna try raiding two raptors but luckily i stumbled upon this article
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101
So i just bought one.

 

Thanks to all for your ideas & help & to Rikki for the Anandtech link - Very interesting! Thanks again Guys - J