Hi guys! I'm trying to add a extra IDE HD to my system. I already have two SATA drives in a RAID 0 config. When I power up, it seems like it is trying to boot the new IDE drive.All I get is some funny characters on the monitor. Is there some trick to adding a IDE drive to a system already running SATA drives? I have the new drive on IDE 2. Thanks for any help! You guys are great. I, however, am not.

Oh ouch! A RAID 0....you do realize that RAID 0 offers no redundancy and if one drive should ever crash, you lose all the data contained on both drives!?!? I hope you have some real good backups setup. I'm betting you're a gamer and some gaming site said you get performance benefits from this RAID level and that's why you went with it? If so, bare in mind that any performance gains will not be noticable to the human eye or inside of game play....making it a moot point to do so. Truth be told, you're better off just using both disks as single drives or configure them in a RAID 1. As to your IDE problem...check the BIOS setting for your IDE, you may have two options there....one as a bootable and the other nonbootable. If so, choose nonbootable and that should clear up the problem of the system trying to boot to it.

I agree with Curt. There have been tests run by magazines (Maximum PC for one) that show raid 0 does not improve game performance, in fact just the opposite in some cases.

Actually, I was adding this IDE drive to back up my other two so I could reconfigure to RAID 1 and to have extra storage for music. (I'm not a gamer, just thought RAID 0 was cool when I built my first machine) You guys are great. I, however, am not.

Never seen a setting in the BIOS to change a drive from Bootable to Non-Bootable, but there will be a setting for boot sequence. In fact there may be two different settings for Boot sequence. The first will have options like Floppy, CD, & HD. If there are options such as HD0, HD1, etc. just make sure your new hard drive does not appear in this list. However, if there is just an entry for Hard Drive, then there should be a sub list to specify the order that hard drives are to be utilized for boot purposes Michael J

My BIOS hasn't changed. It's still set to boot from HD0 first. Why would it try to boot from the new drive without any changes to the boot sequence? I don't see any problems with the BIOS settings, I guess I could play around with different boot orders to see if it makes a difference. Has anyone added a IDE drive to their existing machine configured for RAID? You guys are great. I, however, am not.

I'm very glad to hear you're going to switch to a RAID 1. However, in so doing, you will only have the amount of a single drive available. If your controller is capable of RAID 5 and you can afford a 3'd identical drive, that's the way to go. Then you end up with the total amount of 2 drives (in a RAID 5, the 3'd drive is for parity). In either case, a RAID 1 or 5 does indeed provide redundancy and helps to protect your data. I just bought a new PC with an onboard RAID capable controller. Presently I only have the on SATA drive installed. If I remember tonight, I'll check and see about the BIOS settings I was referring to. I haven't checked into it too much as of yet but I seem to recall having the choice between setting IDE or SATA to being bootable or nonbootable, which is why I mentioned it. I do have an extra IDE HDD I've been planning on putting in my PC for backup (Used in conjunction with weekly backups to DVD-RW's) so I'll get back to you and let you know.