Raid0 Setup Guide

[Stacked]

*I'm going to make this as simple as possible. I'm not one for long drawn out words but I hope this is helpful to people who have no clue, like myself when I started. Pardon the misspellings and poor grammar.

 

Components used:

Hitachi 80GB SATA drives X3

Abit IC7-Max3 Motherboard

 

This is done as a new install, meaning I wiped my old drive and did a fresh install of Windows.

 

1. Plug up your drives.

 

I pluged the 3 drives into the 4, 5, and 6 SATA port slots.

 

2. Set drives up as Raid0

 

Right after the BIOS flash screen I got a message saying to hit CTRL+S or F4 to enter the raid utility.

In this utility I selected the first option that was titeled something to the effect of "Raid Drives".

I selected Raid0 and the number of drives to set was 3.

 

3. Run the Windows install disk.

 

*Install the Raid drivers from the disket that came with the motherboard, when the windows driver setup starts. Use F6. ( This applyed to me, but it could be different for different board models. )

Once you get into the partition portion of this only 1 drive was showing. ( This is because they are set in raid0 mode. )

I ran a complete NTS format on the drive.

After this was completed I installed windows as normal.

 

Problems Encounterd

 

At first I spent a good hour or 2 trying to figure out why BIOS would find the drives, while windows would not in the partitioning section of the install.

 

This was because I was forgeting to put in my Raid driver disket that came with the mother board. You can access the custom driver install as the install disk is loading the driver when it first intializes, before the partition screen.

 

Conclusion

 

I'm finaly up and runing again after 5 hours of funbeling around with the setup. I went from a transfer rate of about 80MB per sec to about 120MBs per sec. Windows boots up alot faster than before and I can tell a real differance when installing bloated software. All in all I feal this was an excelt uprade for my system.