RAID with large drives

[dpbement]

I am going to buy an Abit TH7II RAID motherboard and want to get a pair of 100GB WD hard drives to pair together for a RAID 0 config. I want to build this system and use Windows XP. I thought I would boot from a floppy that has FDISK and FORMAT on it and format the drives. Can the BIOS handle the 200GB (collectively) drive? Can Windows XP handle it? I keep reading about limitations of 32GB on XP and 127GB, etc. I don't get it. I helped a friend install an 80GB drive on Win98 and had no problem and didn't have to partition it. Is what I have planned a bad idea? Thanks.

 

[Lars_Coleman]

It should be fine. I would just make sure you use NTFS. It has less limitations then FAT32. The limitation you speek of with 32GB is with Fat32 in Windows2000 and Windows XP. So the work around is to use the better NTFS filesystem. The limitation of 127GB is an LBA limitation of your BIOS. I wouldn't worry about that one untill you buy a single drive of a 127GB+.

The RAID controller (If you will be running RAID 0) will see the drives separate but stripe them together as one. So they'll be supported as 100GB drives (under the 127GB limitation.)

If you are planning to boot to the RAID array, I would just boot to the XP cd and partition and format within the installation. Just make sure you "press F6 to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" at first boot of the XP CD. Look for that at first boot at the bottom of the screen.

<font color=red>1GHz AMD x MSI K7T-Turbo x 512MB PC133 x 2-Maxtor 30GB/RAID 0 = Stream Line Butterfly</font color=red>