How do you setup two harddrives in RAID?

[985323]

im not sure, help is appreciated

[Indybird]

im not sure, help is appreciated

Its a very different process depending on which motherboard you have. Look in your mobo manual; they usually have somewhat easy to understand instructions.

By the way what type of RAID are you doing RAID 1 (Security) or 0 (Speed)?

-Indybird

[Luke122]

If your motherboard doesnt have a raid controller, then you'll need to get one. But like Indybird mentioned above, it really does vary from vendor to vendor.

For example, on my Asus board, in the BIOS I chose the drives I wanted to be part of the raid. Then I rebooted, and pressed CTRL+F to get into the raid controller setup, and chose to create a raid between the drives I selected.

On my Intel board, I just went straight into the raid controller setup and did it from there.

What motherboard do you have?

[SgtM]

Don't forget.. the drives have to be identical (same manufacturer/capacity).

[Indybird]

Don't forget.. the drives have to be identical (same manufacturer/capacity).

Actually, some controllers will just lower the usable space to match the smaller . Like if you put in a Western Digital 80GB Hard Drive and a Hitachi 120GB Hard Drive then the controller will cut out 40GB of Hard Drive Space on the Hitachi and you will only get 160GB between the two of them (RAID 0) or 80GB between the two of them (RAID 1). If you simply want to combine the sizes of the two hard drives then there is usually an option to do that, but it will come at a performance hit.

-Indybird

[SgtM]

True, but for a RAID noob, it's best to have identical drives. Hell, even I hate setting them up sometimes.

[985323]

thank you, I have a XFX nforce 680i motherboard and two identical western digital 500gb hard drives

[Crazy Buddhist]

There is a very thorough RAID guide and "how to" located here (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/393).

CrazyB