Well, this may be a silly question...but I am new to dabbling in setting stuff up in RAID. Here it is : If I have XP loaded onto a ATA100 IDE, but also have 2 SATA arranged in RAID 0...will I get a preformance boost from the RAID drives for applications that are installed there? FOr instance, XP is on the ATA100 IDE and I had a game, say Splinter Cell on the RAID, will preformance be limitted by the fact that the OS is on a slower drive? I am a little confused by this and could really really use a helping hand and an explanation. Thank you all ahead of time for your, um, time. I searched around and this always seems to be the most informative/helpful/friendly forum.

Anything you install on the RAID 0 Array will benefit from a performance boost inherent in the RAID 0 configuration. Check this site out. http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Hi greenlooon If you have 2 SATA drives in a Raid 0 array why in heavens name havent you got Win Xp running from them ? The peromance increase on the SATA drives and win xp, confuggured on Raid 0 Stripping mode is huge, to say the least. The sata drives operat at much higher transfer rates than ide drives. Windows perfomance will lift by a huge margin. PLus there are other benefits associated with the setup also. As dave02 said read up on it, and I will bet that you will be rebuilding the OS on the SATA raid drives before you finsh reading the first paragraph. Regards Janos

Well, to be honest...my thought process was 2 fold. First, I was thinking that if XP was on a seperate drive, away from the RAID it would enable me to reinstall windows at will without the hastle of reinstalling everything along with it. That being said it would also protect XP if anything happened to the RAID drives. Second, the RAID drives a relatively small in comparison to the IDE. Thrirdly, I am a noob...:P So, what I am trying to find out is...in the mean time will the programs that are on the raid run faster than if they were on the IDE OR are they going to run at the same speed as the drive the OS is on? Thanks again!

The answer to your question is YES. There is the added safety of raid setup, the raid manager keeps an eye on the perfomance of each disk in the array. In the event one starts showing problems, you will be warned far in advance of eather of the 2 drives failing. You can use the second option, slightly lower perfomance is the MIrroring option. Basicly what it means, at any given time there will be your main OS setup and applications, DUPLICATED and saved on the other drive. If one fails you still have the fully working OS and the raid utility will instruct you step by step how to replace the failed drive, and rebuild the raid aray. Raid STRIPPING, setup is used by many video editing setups due to its large cluster size allocation, and the fact the heads will write to the fastest drive at any given point in time. The setup is a bit more complex when installing windows, but worth the messing arround in the long run. And if your Mother board supports dual chanel operation mode even better. I guess the only way to convince yourself is to try it. Mine is running raid 0 STRIPPING mode with 1 gig of ram, with XP forced to load and run from the ram. No swap file used at all. If you need any further info, in repsect to setup just drop me a line. Regards Janos