(12-29-2014, 12:27 PM)Niteshade0 Wrote: I know about as much about RAID setup and configuration as I do with heavy network tweaking( essentially nil)
Initiating crash-course in basic RAID setup...
Luckily with the latest boards from Intel, their integrated controller is sufficient for any home use application.
After you have everything hooked up and you boot the computer, go into your BIOS and find the IDE Drive controller settings. Change it to RAID mode (not IDE or AHCI). When you reboot, hit Ctrl+I when it prompts (during the controller's boot-up sequence). From there you just follow the on-screen instructions. Pick the drives you want to add, create the array, and give it a name.
There are really only two modes to concern yourself with.
RAID 0 - This is a disk stripe. It has no redundancy, so if one drive dies you lose EVERYTHING. The benefit here is that all disks will read/write at the same time, in sync, so you get VERY fast speeds in this configuration. All drive space is combined as well, so you have full storage capacity.
RAID 1 - This is a mirror. Both drives have the exact same data written to each, so if one drive dies the system kicks over to the functional one. You gain no performance in this setup, just data redundancy. You also lose the storage capacity of the 2nd drive since they are both used for the same data.
Any other configuration requires 3+ drives.
After the array is setup all you need to do is reboot and install windows. It should see the array as one hard drive. Depending on how new your motherboard is you -may- need drivers for the chipset before Windows recognizes the array. If that is the case, setup will prompt you that it cannot find a suitable drive. Just have your Motherboard drives ready beforehand on a flash drive.
One other thing of note, the Intel on-board SATA controller will automatically down-clock your SATA 3 ports if you combine drives from the SATA 2 bus into a RAID array. If you only use drives on the SATA 3 bus, it will run at full speed. So if you have 3 drives and the first 2 are a mirror on SATA 3, it will run at full speed while the 3rd drive will run at its own speed as a second drive.
