Member Avatar for SolveEtCoagula

I built my computer a year ago and put it together from scratch for my first time on my own. I have since forgot pretty much everything lol. I jus came across this website looking for a tech help forum so hopefully this is ok.

I need to reformat. I forgot how to reformat and I am not sure if its done any different when you have raided hard drives. I do not use them for different os's or anything. I only use my computer for gaming and school. Specifically MMORPGS.

I know there is a certain raid settings that is better for gaming but I can not remember which one. Does anyone know?

I mainly wanted to know if any of you could point me to a very through walk thorough on how to reformat raided drivers and put windows XP back on them.

Thanks a lot.

My hard drives are 10krpm Raptors btw.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by mikerosoftin200
Member Avatar for mikerosoftin200

10k Raptors, wow! Are you sure your drives are RAIDed? When you said "I do not use them for different os's or anything" it makes it sound like you have two totally separate drives. With a raid, your computer recognizes both drives as one. Anyway, when you install windows, sometime during the beginning of the install, it will ask you to push a key to install 3rd party RAID or SATA drivers (I think it's f6). If your raid controller is built on to the motherboard, you will have to configure your raid from bios (I think, I've never done it on a built in card, but this only makes sense) or it might prompt you during boot to hit a key to enter the raid utility.
In your case (with 2 10k raptors) I don't know if I'd even raid them together. For gaming, technically, RAID 0 is best because it "stripes" your data onto two drives, so each drive only reads/writes half the data, thus doubling read/write speed. In real life, though, this only shaves maybe a SECOND off of loading times, but nothing more. The disadvantage of this is that it doubles your risk of data loss. If either of your drives go bad (which can happen (especially with raptors)), the whole array is screwed. It is impossible to recover your data.
If I were you, I'd keep the drives separate. You can configure Windows to put your documents on the other drive and you can run games off the first.

hope this helps

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