setting up raid 0

[donkon]

Hey guys, did some research about raid 0, i have 2 wd20ears and want to go ahead and do a raid 0 setup on the classified mobo. Just wondering, when i do this, should i disconnect my other 3 hdds including the main one with os to do the raid with the wd20ears?, then connect them back after raid is setup or it doesnt matter?

[gingerbee]

yes i would unplug them, but i think that the wd may have a feature turned off so raid may be on issue. have not used wd in a very long time for raid

[donkon]

thx the reply, i have set it up, one thing that confused me in the setup was the stripe block size, i chose 64kb as the wd20ears is 4096kb sectors, i thought that would create a partition, should i go in and change it back to 128kb, then in windows when i create partition ill enter the 4096kb, or was 64kb instead of 128 in raid config the right thing to do?

[gingerbee]

it really only matter if your setting it up for large file transfers 128 would be better for larger files but 64 is fine i would not redo it unless you just don't care and are having fun with it

[donkon]

actually i am doing it for large file transfers, going to be my storage for movies which always have size 4.5gb to around 10gb each. Guess i have to go in and delete and redo them. Edit: Just setup and format the raid drive, is it normal after creating partition on raid for 200mb space be used, even though theirs nothing on it and its brand new partition?

[donkon]

Also i just ran hd tune pro and the speeds are pathetic, i tested these hard drives separately before doing the raid and they where pretty good http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/1...st20102041.png I also ran the wdidle3 and changed it to 62 minutes so thats not the problem.

[gingerbee]

did you install teh 9.6 intel storage manager and then enable write caching???. http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sear...ntel%C2%AE+RST)
2nd from the top list of downloads

edit those numbers seem real real low so i am wondering did you check if those drives are ok to setup in raid.
what i mean is WD sells drive purposely setup for a raid drive so on there newer drives i have heard they turn a feature off not sure if this has anything to do with your problem but if i were you i would check it out just to be sure.

[donkon]

Hey, i actually did the wdidle3 thing in dos today before doing the raid, as i also did some research in wd20ears as raid and people have said they work good in raid, just the default timeout thing was making movie playback stutter, but with the wdidle3 tool it changed it from 8 second to 60 minutes so that is fixed. I am downloading that tool right now and will let you know what happens. Btw, i also tried removing the raid, and when i deleted it in bios and restarted the comp, the post message still says that one of the two hard drives has "raid inside", i continued to windows but was stuck on the windows boot flag for 10 minutes before windows actually loaded.

Edit: I just tried installing that software but keep getting message " This computer does not meet the minimum requirements to install this software"

Edit#2: I decided not to do raid, too much hassle for such embarrassing speeds, ill just run them separately (back to 86/mbs, only did it because was told the speeds would be double. I removed the raid finally, had to move around cables, reset cmos 3 times but it seems to work now. Thanks for the help, i really appreciate it

[gingerbee]

did you not update to netframe3.5 it's needed for intel 9.6. but if data lose is a concern then raid may not be for you. i am pretty sure the raid was not working right because it use's a portion of ram to buffer the data to the raid0 drives increasing there buffer to stay fill so they max out. "laymen's meaning"

it's normal to get low reads before you install and turn on write caching but those where real low which puzzle's me since you did widdle3 ( forgot what it was before ha ha)

No problem at all, gingerbee