Confused about SATA RAID

[Tokyoprince]

Hi,
I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard which supports SATA with RAID. I want to fit 2 drives as RAID striped, (motherboard manual briefly describes how). However, can I leave my IDE UDMA drive in place and use as a slave? If so will I have to change the jumpers? Will I still be able to use my internal ZIP drive which is on the same UDMA ribbon cable? How do I configure the SATA's as my boot drive? The motherboard support CD contains SATA drivers, but how do I install these untill I already have the drives up & running with an OS installed? I'm a little confused, any help greatfully appreciated. Thanks

[Tokyoprince]

Maybe I am partly answering my own question here, is it that you install the OS first then the drivers after, so in fact in a RAID 0, (striped), set the OS is only actually installed on one of the disks? I wonder Hmmmmmmmmm?

[JjEjFjF]

Before the os installs , it should ask you if you want to install raid drivers.
Raid drivers HAVE to be installed first , otherwise i assume the os will install on one drive.
I have Raid 0 on one of my computers.If i were you i wouldnt bother. The preformance gain is minimal and not worth the hastle.
After i bought and installed my 2 WD 36gig raptors Raid 0 , i found out that a single 74gig Raptor has a much faster seek time than my raid.

[Teachingmyself]

I would advise against raid 0 unless you're data is not important.Any drives hooked up to a raid 0 will run at the speed of the slowest drive.As far as I can remember you will only have one drive shown,the same as raid 1 etc but we rarely support raid 0 except to help customers undo it and switch to 1.This is how volatile raid 0 is(by the way raid stands for redundant array of independent disks and raid 0 does not have redundant or independant disks so lets just call it striping)

you want to write file ABCD to you're hard drive,this is what striping does-
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABCD goes to raid controller and raid controller assigns this-

HD1 | HD2
A | B
C | D
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can see you're files are spread across as many hard drives as you have,this is why they must run at the speed of the slowest.

If you lose one hard disk,you lose EVERYTHING!

say disk 2 fails -

HD1 | HD2
A | *
C | *

Striping attempts to call back file ABCD and you get A*C*.Gibberish in
other words,assuming the O.S. doesn't report an error.So now you have a dead HD and all you're files are gone.You have a lot of semicomplete files on HD1 but unless you're willing to pay massive money it's no good to you at all.Even then there's no guarantee HD2 is salvagable enough to re-combine your files.