R-a-i-d

[PrObLy]

Since I spent the extra bux to get the Abit kx7-333 with Raid, I figure that it should be put to use...I just have one question. Right now I'm running an ata133 maxtor 80 gig 7200 rpm harddrive and want to go ahead and get another drive and use raid 0. Would I have to totally empty off and reformat my current drive to set up raid using it or could I just hook up the next drive and make a raid array. Ok, I guess I have two questions....Would my next drive have to be equal to the size of my first drive to take full advantage of the raid, or could it, say, be only 20 gigs in size? thanks in advance. :)

[PrObLy]

do you think it would be worth my while to pick up a couple quick 20 gigs and set those up on raid 0 for my games and leave my 80 gig maxtor for the os and general storage?

[NuTs62]

RAID 0 is a good idea, but yeah, like chosen mentioned.. unreliable. One of my IBM drives started clicking and well, I had to start from scratch. Now I'm running a RAID 5, at least there is some insurance with this stuff! 2 20gigs isn't ideal since you can probably pay less for one 40gb drive. How much space are you planning on using? You don't HAVE to use your RAID ya know. Its only if you want everything in one big drive.

[PrObLy]

I should have never mentioned this whole RAID thing.... it seems as my wish has come true (not necesarily in the best way, either). I was doing some overclocking tests to see what I could run stable at (before I had the 2100+ at 1900 almost stable) so I put it at 1833, a mere 100mhz increase, and the temperatures were only a couple degrees warmer than stock, it seemed to be running great, then I got the XP blue screen of death, you know when you get the blue screen in XP something's up....so I restarted and changed everything back to normal and it told me that my c:\windows\system32\config\SYSTEM file was corrupt or missing, so I booted up mr xp pro cd and went to the "repair prompt" or whatever it's called, but nothing seemed to fix it, so I ended up reinstalling windows and moved everything over my network to my older computer for backup and am planning on buying an additional HD tomorrow and making a RAID array since I have to reinstall all my drivers and software anywho. Am I right in saying that if I purchase a 40gb hard drive and array it with my 80gb hard drive, the total space will only be 80 gb instead of 120? And does anyone have any suggestions for fixing that corrupted file without reinstalling windows next time it happens to me (ill be dumb and keep attempting to overclock).

[PrObLy]

thanks a bunch Chosenfool , I noticed that as well when this problem first happened, I reset my bus and everything worked fine again, but this time I reset the bus, voltage, and everything (I cleared the cmos too) and that little bastard still didn't wanna do anything so I was damned stumped. I increase the voltage (once I had it increased all the way...which isn't too high on the kx7333) and I still would get those blue screens even at around 1.93 ghz. Thanks for filling me in on the raid info, I'll be sure to buy an 80gigger and I'm a risky s.o.b so I'll be sure to run it all on RAID 0 hehe, speaking of risky, check out this link http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1009
that's what I'm going to be attempting tomorrow as well :) so please wish me luck, lol. Would you recommend making seperate partitions (if it's even possible w/ RAID cuz I knows its purpose is to 'combine' drives) because a 160gb partition seems quite large.

[PrObLy]

I jacked up the voltage a bit again on the 2100+ but told it to run the ram at only 133mhz and put the bus to 140, giving me 1833 mhz and then ran sandra's burn in wizard on cpu and multimedia for a half hour and its still running great....the reason I tried this was because there was an review somewhere of my board that said it's unstable at ram set at 166mhz, but really stable at 133 and strangely theres no performance difference (my benchmarks were slightly lower, like 25 megs less bandwidth) so your advice on the voltage, Chosenfool, seems to have done the trick.

back to the RAID

hmm.....one huge virtual drive huh? sounds pretty cool to me, thats probly what i'll do have a 160gb virtual drive, that way i can brag to all my fellow engineer classmates in august, hehe.

*** one more thing......how come noone ever answers my signature question....it's a serious question because i've never used 3dmark before so i dont know what a good score is.