New to RAID 0 on MSI K8T NEO

[karbon86]

hey guys i just ordered 2x80gb Seagate 7200rpm 8mb buffer SATA drives. I have the MSI K8T NEO FIS2R or whatever board with the onboard promise controller. I was wondering what i need to watchout for with this setup if anyone has done raid 0 with this board and XP pro. I was thinking of doing a 4k cluster size and 64kb stripe size based on another thread in this forum. I'm mostly doing raid 0 for load times in games such as SWG and BF1942 type games. anyways let me know if you guys have any info that might help me cuz i have no idea what to expect

[Hotdog]

In all honesty, in all of the RAID setups I've done with my Raptors, I haven't seen a big difference between stripe sizes. I usually just go w/ 64k, since its generally "in the middle." Either way, any stripe size will be nice.

[piloteer81]

I'm sure you know the larger the stripe size, the greater the performance, but data will be stored less efficiently leaving you with less hard drive space.
With 160gb at your disposal, its better to go for 64k minimum. But as the other guy says, there isn;t really much difference, although I haven't actually tested the difference between say a 16k and a 128k stripe sizes. I believe I have 64k too which gives good performance

Apart from this, it should be fairly straight forward. You'll need to have the sata driver disk to hand to install during windows setup, and to have your raid array setup, partitioned and formatted too, just to make sure its up and running.

I have heard that for best performance its not a good idea to have your page file running on a raid array as constant reading and writing on a raid is slower than a single hard drive. If possible have it on a separate drive.

That said, you'll be amazed at the speed increase especially in loading games. You'll almost always be the first into online games