Hi guys Just ordered a second Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II Hard Drive and want to run them both on RAID 0. (if possible) But as you may have guessed I have no idea how to do this. I've done a little research on Google and watched a few videos on youtube but they've not really given me much insight as to how I do it. I no I have the choice of soft RAID 0 and Hard RAID 0, but not sure which is best and unsure as to what my motherboard supports. My second question is I want to do a complete windows format ready for the new Hard Drive. I have my windows CD ready but I'm unsure what drivers I will need to put to disc before hand, so a link to the correct ones for my system would be great. Few details: Motherboard = abit IP35 PRO(P35+ICH9R) 1.x(BIOS:10 Graphics Card = XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX CPU = 2.45 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 Not sure if you need any more information in order to help, but do ask and I will try to provide Thanks again -Flash

Why do you feel the need to run RAID0? Not the best choice for a motherboard. Abit has announce they are going out of the motherboard business.

Was advised it offers better performance when gaming and when downloading at high speeds. Is this not true?

Looks to be a pair of fast drives you have. NCQ is good. I think running those guys in RAID1 would work well. OK, if you are going to do this you will use the RAID controller on the motherboard. The jury is still out on the debate about faster gaming when using RAID0. I believe that the hard drive is not the bottleneck in game play but I guess it could be in some games. If you are hell bent on setting up a RAID0 array you should Google "stripe size". The problem with RAID0 is it has no redundancy. What that means is that if one drive craps out on you the array is broken and can't be repaired. Most users feel this risk is small due to the long MTBF (mean time between failure) with modern drives. Even if that were true you are doubling the chance based solely on the fact you have TWO drives. However, there is another factor that is not widely known. Look at the excerpt below to see what I am referring to. Enterpise quality drives are built differently so this is not as much of an issue. It can be an issue with ANY RAID version. RAID-specific, Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) - Significantly reduces drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives. The quote about is from the WDigital site. Link below. http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/... What this mean to you is this. If one of your drives takes too long to perform a self check it is dropped from the array. When running RAID 5 for instance this wouldn't be the end of the world because there is some redundancy so another drive could be placed in service. I have read that once a drive is dropped from an array it is tagged somehow and can't simply be reinserted. Of course with RAID0 if one drive is dropped the array is broken and you reformat at best. So that means you need to maintain some sort of backup for your files. Unless you like installing from scratch. I don't think RAID0 will speed up downloads. The weak link in downloading is usually the internet connection. Google "myths about RAID0" without the quotes and read the opinions there.