Hi there everyone. Basically what I have at the moment is my system which is AMD X2 3800+, 2GB Corsair RAM, Asus A8N-E mo/bo, Geforce 6600LE PCI-E set up and running Win XP MCE 2005 on my primary IDE master drive, a 60GB IDE drive, with a 250GB IDE as my primary slave for storage. I am about to go out shopping right now and buy Norton Ghost and a pair of SATA drives. I have two questions. Firstly, the 60GB is going into another PC but i need all of the data on it (my OS) because it took a long while to get compatible drivers etc set up on it for my hardware.(Hence my first shopping item, Norton Ghost. So, firstly, do I Install my OS onto the 250GB IDE as my primary IDE master and RAID 0 the SATAs for storage or would it be beneficial to install my OS onto the RAID 0 drives and keep my 250GB as the storage drive? If i keep the 250GB IDE as my OS drive i need to transfer all of it's stored data over to the RAID 0 drives. I assume this is simple as copy and paste from within my current OS once the RAID drives are set up? I will look into how to actually set up the RAID from an already installed OS when i get the drives later today. If i want to use the RAID drives for my OS (would this increase performance much or at all?) would it even be posible to restore an image from an IDEdrive onto a RAID 0 pair? I think there may be more than 2 questions there, sorry, I hope you can help me with this soon because it is vitally important i get the 60GB (current OS drive) out of this pc and into another and get this one back running MCE as it is now before tuesday. I look forward to your replies, thank you. Alias: Neo

Several steps to accomplish what you want. Install the SATA drives, and transfer your data from the 250. Format the 250. Ghost the 60 with operating system onto the 250. Remove the 60. Place the 250 in as primary master and verify the boot/successful ghosting. As to your question on whether you would see a performance improvement by having your operating system loaded on SATA rather than IDE drive, I don't believe it would make any discernible difference at anything other than startup. Once your operating system loads up into ram there is little read/write that happens within the operating system files. Speed of access to data files on which you wish to perform tasks is what you get with SATA and RAID 0 I believe if you try to ghost your operating system from an IDE drive onto a SATA drive you may be unable to boot. Apart from having to reset bios to SATA as boot device, you may run into problems with the boot.ini configuration relating to drive ennumeration convention. Your boot.ini will be pointing at Disk (0) RDISK (0) Partition (1) which in laymens terms is first partition on Primary Master IDE Harddrive. Depending on whether and how many IDE devices you have connected, your SATA drive could end up being RDISK (3) or (4) I don't know whether GHOST supports writing to a raid array anyway. Here's some reading on Raid that you may find udeful. http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/ I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

I see a significant improvement, burning and games, processing data and startup. IDE is the past and sata is the future, I dont know about you, I like my sata 250 with 16mb cache. Jim R

SATA has some advantages over IDE & I agree that it's the future, but if you were to compare an ATA100 w/16MB cache vs an SATA w/16MB cache, there would be little or no difference in performance. Systems don't even saturate the full 100MB/s capacity of ATA100, let alone 150MB/s of SATA1 or 300MB/s of SATA2. And RAID-0 is a high risk setup...there is a performance gain but it isn't as significant as some people claim, & if one HDD goes, you lose ALL you data with no hope of recovery.

Jam is absolutely right. Both SATA and Raid are highly overrated. Tests by Maximum PC magazine and others determined that raid 0 did not improve game performance significantly, and in some cases actually decreased it. Do yourself a favor BACKUP! Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Ok, I bought 2 x 250GB SATA 2 16mb drives. I came to the same idea about the order to get everything moved around but i tried connecting and as soon as i power up, it cuts back out, so i disconnect power from either the 2 SATA or the 2 IDE and then it powers up, not with 3 drives powered and not with 4, I even disconnected my optical drives and still no luck. Any ideas? the PSU is 520W the ratings are .... 3.3v-28A, +5V-35A, +12V-30A, -5v-0.5A, -12v-0.8A, +5VSB-2.5A. I really hope this can be easily fixed without a new PSU or anything, I just bought this and i'm now totally broke from the recent additions to my storage capacity. Thanks Alias: Neo

I think you should just load Windows normally and forget about the voodoo. Plenty of pitfalls in trying to jerryrig this.