Question RAID on P35-DS3: Impossible or risky?

[LuKaWin10]

Hello, by the title, I wanna have RAID on P35-DS3. Preferably RAID 1 suggested by one of my friends. I wanna ofcourse have it ran on two of the same HDDs (Seagate Barracudas ST3250410AS, 2x250GB drives). I do not have the so called "Intel Matrox Storage Technology (or whatever the name is)" I only have the 2 Gygabyte SATA ports to configure RAID on them. I wanna have RAID configured on this for 2 reasons:
1) to partition it and have on one part saved data (Windows Loaders, old pictures, hacks (not like bad stuff just keygens and sh**), and more)
2) Windows XP (x64 version to utilise all 8 Gigabytes of RAM, and Server 2003 is meh to run as the features like the themes are not really there...)

My questions are here:

1) Is it possible to configure RAID 1 on this board
2) Will the Gygabyte Utility for RAID be good enough for my own setup
3) Is configuring this a complicated process?

Thanks, and I hope somebody replies!

Also I will buy 1 HDD to have 2 of the same ones (I will buy the HDD on Ebay used but its health is great!)

 

[USAFRet]

I wanna have RAID...

Why?
Especially with 2x 250GB drives.

What are you hoping this RAID 1 will do for you?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Unless you are running a business that requires 24/7 uptime there is absolutely NO reason to run RAID. Ever. RAID was never intended for general use by the unwashed masses and comes with a very large number of pitfalls.

 

[BFG-9000]

Neither. That board has a jMicron RAID controller, presumably a JMB363, which works fine with disks and not so well with ATAPI devices where weird things will happen like your optical drive disappearing after sleep. Later Gigabyte P45 boards usually came with JMB368 which at least fixed that particular problem.

Such a controller is perfect for combining otherwise useless small SATA SSDs in RAID0 to get some usable capacity into your retro PC for basically free. I mean what else would <128GB SSDs be useful for nowadays? Sure, TRIM doesn't work but then TRIM generally didn't work in XP anyway unless the SSDs are old enough to have a drive-specific manual XP TRIM utility from the drive manufacturer.

So use old SSDs you may already have laying around and don't bother buying any tired old HDDs. I'll suggest if you have any HDDs to attach them to the ICH9 chipset controller instead to use as your data drives, and to only keep easily reinstalled OS and programs on the RAID0 SSD setup because that really is as iffy as it sounds. But then retro PCs are for playing with and doing things to now, that you never would have tried back when they were your main PC.

You will need a working floppy drive to load the F6 drivers for the RAID controller during Win XP installation.