I know this is a dumb question, but I've never had to deal with it before. I have a box with win2k server running on it. It has one hard drive (IDE) The data on this box is very sensitive, and I want to put in a RAID 0, so I know I need to have a SCSI RAID Controller and 2 SCSI hard drives. My question is, how do they hook up for a raid 0? In my head, I always imagined the controller card would have two slots, one for each hard drive (And for higher RAID arrays, it would have 3 or 5 slots), however now that I'm pricing them out, they seem to only have one internal slot each. Does that mean that I would need to daisy chain the two hard drives into the one slot? Or would I need two SCSI cards, one for each drive? Also, I'll probably get an Adaptec Raid controller from CDW, will that come with step by step instructions? Again, I know this is somewhat petty, but my basic websearches haven't given me anything clear, and I know that this is the best place to get answers..

SCSI is not a requirement to run RAID. If you don't currently have SCSI there's no need to buy SCSI for a RAID. Unless you are running a major network, some folks think SCSI is "Da Bomb" There are numerous IDE RAID controllers out there reasonably priced. I am using IDE controllers for Two RAID 0's and a RAID 5, all with 4 drives each. Check manufactures like Promise or HighPoint for samples of IDE RAID controllers. A 4 port controller has 4 IDE channels each with a Primary and Secondary. For RAID you would only use the primary drive on each controller. Setup is easy but you want to ensure the drives are all the same size or as close as possible. One 10 Gig drive and 3 300Gig drives would net a 40 Gig RAID 0. The largest RAID size is limited to the smallest hard drive size. Hope this helps. Also Check out Tomshardware.com and search for RAIDS, they have some great information. Greg

You have also chosen the wrong raid level. You want raid1 not raid0. Raid0 is only striping which is fast but no fault tolerance. Raid1 is mirroring where both drives are exact copies of each other. For sensitive info you want to mirror. Scsi is still far superior to ide. It is very simple to get a scsi raid card and two drives. You install the card and cable the drives. One has to be set to id0 and the other id1. You need a active terminator at the end of the cable and the drives need to be checked that they are not configured to do termination or you will have problems. Next step is go into the raid bios and create a raid array which in your case is a mirror set. This is all covered in the raid card documentation. Only trick after creating and formatting the raid set is during install to hit f6 and supply the raid card driver on floppy so install sees the drive [raid takes multiple drives and reports them as a single to the OS - this is a good thing]

Terrific, thanks for the info guys. It's all so simple, but for some reason, I didn't know it :/ Now, the last step is Ghosting the current IDE image onto a SCSI hard drive. Any reason why it would be any different than cloning IDE to IDE?

Yep big difference. It concerns the registry and what is set as boot. This can be corrected either by [after the ghosting] going into recovery console and running the utilities fixmbr and fixboot [assuming the driver for the new array is loaded] and/or starting the W2k server install from booting the cd, going into install [not recovery console] and doing a repair. Have the raid controller driver for w2k on floppy disk and hit f6 [you will see when if you look in the lower left hand corner for the message] to add the driver. You should boot and be fine after that. You would be advised to disconnect the power cable to the ide drive until you are up and running on the new array due to drive letter enumeration issues.

That's excellent advice, I appreciate it. You've saved me a lot of time via trial end error / research. I'll posts back again when I actually do it if I get stuck. Thank you