HDD RAID 0 Assistance

[jc096887]

Long story short, I tried to RAID 0 my two, 1 TB, 7200 RPM, 6 Gb/s HDDs and use this as my only hard drive (C) in the computer and failed miserably. The computer would randomly freeze and the device manager would tell me that the CPU (3.4 GHz, quad-core) and C drive were working at full capacity during these freezes, even though I was just working in Word or Excel the majority of the time. In the end, I switched the drives back to normal IDE drives with one just sitting there doing nothing right now (since I don't have over 1 TB of stuff on the computer yet) and it's working perfectly. No freezing or anything.

Question 1: Does anyone think that they know where I might have screwed up in the initial RAID 0 installation?

Question 2: Would it be worth my time to try the RAID 0 setup again, or just get a small (32 GB) SSD for the OS and have Windows array the two HDDs in a RAID 0 for programs/games/storage?

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'm only going to address question two. That's a much better idea, although 32 GB is on the small side for the more recent OSes. If you do RAID0 the two HDDs, the advantage to doing it in the Windows Disk Management is that the result will be portable. Hardware RAID pairs are frequently trashed if the hardware fails, or hiccups. Windows pairs, while they may be a little teensy bit slower, have all the volume information on all the drives, and another Windows install can always put Humpty Dumpty together again.