Installing a Raid 0 Setup Questions

[Matt Bauman]

I have a MSI Z87 g45 motherboard and im currently running a 240gb ssd for my important programs. I would like to install 2- 2tb HDDs in raid 0 as a seprate storage drive. How would i go about doing this since i dont really understand what ive been searching. Do i need a raid card or can i do with the mother board i have? Basically i want my ssd as boot drive C: and then the 2- 2TB HDD's in a Raid 0 4TB drive D: .

 

[RealBeast]

I would recommend that you not use RAID 0 for storage as it puts your data at a higher risk -- if one disk fails you lose everything.

But if you must do this, then you will have to enable RAID mode on your motherboard (in the bios). Your SSD will operate the same, except software like Samsung or Intel toolboxes won't work. The SSD drive will perform the same as AHCI is a subset of the RAID command set. You then have to build the RAID array in either the bios or using the Windows disk management tools.

 

[Matt Bauman]

im not worried about failure since everything will be backup on external nas hdd unit. Ive just heard raid 0 is the fastest. And basically the only thing i will intalling on there is my games since i dont have near to enough room. So ill put the 2 2tb hdd in my computer and connect each to the motherboard with a sata cable then just setup those 2 drives as a raid in my bios? And i dont use any software for my ssd so that doesnt matter to me. But what do you mean by the ssd will perform same as AHCI is a subset of raid command set? Doing this wont erase any info on my SSD right?

 

[RealBeast]

No, the SSD will be fine.

I would not use the motherboard based raid though as that can be problematic. I would instead use the software "raid" in Windows and make a single spanned volume like THIS so that you don't create issues changing to SATA RAID mode in your bios.

 

[Matt Bauman]

Thank You! That worked perfect. I went with striped which is pretty much raid 0 correct?

 

[RealBeast]

Yes, more or less, this is the description from Microsoft:

A striped volume is a dynamic volume that stores data in stripes on two or more physical disks. Data in a striped volume is allocated alternately and evenly (in stripes) across the disks. Striped volumes offer the best performance of all the volumes that are available in Windows, but they do not provide fault tolerance. If a disk in a striped volume fails, the data in the entire volume is lost.

You can create striped volumes only on dynamic disks. Striped volumes cannot be extended. You can create a striped volume onto a maximum of 32 dynamic disks.