Can you install windows 2003 on a SATA hard drive? I assume the answer to this is yes. If so, can you form a RAID0 stripe set with 2 SATA hard drives and then install the win2k3 OS on that set? If you can is that benifitial in anyway? Or should I just install the OS on a single SATA drive or just stick to a IDE drive and use the SATA drives for data storage? Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

I believe Adaptec's, RocketRaid's and Promise's low-end SATA RAID adapters are supported by 2003. I've been paging through their websites recently and found 2003 drivers for all. I'm pretty sure most SATA RAID adapters are supported. Oddly enough, it seems as though many older IDE RAID cards aren't supported. I recently purchased a ATA-100 Promise FastTrak100 for simple drive mirroring and found out it doesn't support 2003. Sucks.

We have 2003 Std installed on SATA disks in RAID 5, don't know if that helps!

I just finished building my web server with four (4) Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATAs configured in RAID 0+1 and am running W2K3 Web Edition on it. I used a Promise RAID card to control the array and set-up was extremely easy. It took approximately 2-3 minutes. I am currenly using the FastTrak S150 TX4 card, which doesn't offer the W2K3 drivers yet, but used the XP drivers, and everything seems to function beautifully. I emailed Promise to find out when they will be offering W2K3 drivers for this card, and will upgrade the driver upon release. As far as configuring the RAID 0 array, yes this could be done easily, and is a great idea to increase data access speeds. If you are setting up a server though, which I suspect since you are installing W2K3, then you will also want to look into a RAID solution that will also provide FAULT TOLERANCE. Although the standard for many years have been RAID 5, you may want to research into RAID 0+1 (aka RAID10). This array not only stripes the first two disks, but also mirrors them as well, so as you probably figured out, you'll need at least four (4) SATA drives and a RAID card that can support this array and drives. The SATA drives offer increased speeds over IDE drives, and not as responsive as SCSI drives (although very close), but they do run a lot cooler. I hope that this information will assist you, as I would be happy if my months of late night research can help others as it worked (so far) for me. Now I just have to finish constructing my website! http://www.vegabyte.com/ Happy Building!