Help Setting up a RAID

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello everyone, as you can tell im new to this forum and i decided to come by and ask for some help.

Ill try to explain this as simply as i can. So i have an 80gb SSD for my Operating system, i also have 1 640gb Caviar Black and a 1.5tb Caviar black. What i want to do is use the SSD as the primary OS drive and setup the 2 Caviar blacks on RAID 0 configuration, but from what i hear the Blacks are not that good when it comes to RAID 0 so i would like to confirm that with someone here.

  1. My delima is this, will i have to load the Intel RAID drivers at Windows installation?

  2. I know i have to switch the BIOS to RAID (XHD) mode but since the SSD is plugged in, will PC place that into a RAID as well? or should i install the OS and then plug the Hard drives in?

  3. Would i see much of a preformance boost in RAID 0 with the blacks compared to just using one?

  4. lastly would it be best just using the blacks seperatly?

This will be done on a fresh install and the Caviar Blacks will be used for all my other Data and programs.

I would really appriciate any help from the community, as ive been trying to figure this out for a couple days now.

2

Here is a good  RAID Tutorial  that explains how it would work and gives you an idea on setting it up.

Basically you should have multiple drives that are exactly the same and SATA with enhanced capabilities.  I would also suggest that you use RAID 1 or better if you need to safegaurd your information that will be stored on the system.  Only use RAID 0 if you can afford to loose data.

Good luck.

3

Is performance decreased if two sized hard drives are used? i mean they are both The same type of HD with the same Buffer and SATA connections, just the 1.5tb would drop down to match the lowest HD which is the 640gb.