[exitfromreality]

I recently came into posession of two 10k rpm seagate cheetah 74GB SCSI drives and an ATTO Technologies SCSI controler card. The card says that it supports striping in a way that will allow XP to boot from a striped drive, and it says XP normally wont. but how would one accomplish this. I know the XP installation gives me an opportunity to install SCSI drivers as i run setup, but unless im allowed to set up a RAID at that point (which i doubt) I couldnt RAID the drives before installing XP.

The other possible option I thought was to install the drives, boot XP from my existing boot drive, set the RAID up while im running windows only using the card's RAID drivers instead of windows, and then reboot and install then. Except it seems like the drivers from the card that set the drives up as a RAID wouldnt be active since window isnt booted.

any suggestions or expearience in this matter?

thanks
-Colin

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hmmmm, you may have gone the wrong way unless you won those HDDs. for super fast boot, you would want a Gigabyte i-RAM, so much faster than any of those drives. but you could try using the mobos RAID abilities and change it before an OS. or, install the OS then use nVidia's morphing if you are with nVidia, to change the RAID in the OS, it will automatically RAID the OS, or do it next boot. But RAID 0 OS is very dangerous, not for those with sensitive data. if you paid for those drives, i suggest do RAID 1 for safety sakes or get two more and RAID 0+1. other wise, for superfast boot, buy i-RAM and use the SCSI drives and RAID 0 them for other data

[Hammm]

hmmmm, you may have gone the wrong way unless you won those HDDs. for super fast boot, you would want a Gigabyte i-RAM, so much faster than any of those drives. but you could try using the mobos RAID abilities and change it before an OS. or, install the OS then use nVidia's morphing if you are with nVidia, to change the RAID in the OS, it will automatically RAID the OS, or do it next boot. But RAID 0 OS is very dangerous, not for those with sensitive data. if you paid for those drives, i suggest do RAID 1 for safety sakes or get two more and RAID 0+1. other wise, for superfast boot, buy i-RAM and use the SCSI drives and RAID 0 them for other data

[exitfromreality]

the drives were free, i got them from work. so no money lost. As for the Idrive thing, i know thats better, but thats not free, these were so i figured id make do with what I have. turns out one of them is dead anyways so no RAID for me, im just going to use a single one as my boot drive. So my original question isnt really too relevant anymore.

now I just have to deal with the struggle of tracking down a floppy disk (yes, a FLOPPY disk) which is required to install the SCSI card drivers as I install windows. Its a bit of an old card it seems.

thanks anyways though

[warriorscot]

floppy drive is still a required piece of kit for installing SCSI and SATA drivers also a good thing to have and consider they are like 3 quid worth the expenditure.

RAID really isnt for normal users and its not actually that fast for them, its meant for large numbers of disks in a business environment. Biggest factor of boot speed is wether you are using home or pro, home for me will boot in 40 to 50 seconds this pc with pro boots in about 30 or less. A fast drive helps you should be below the 30 seconds mark and even with RAID or a faster drive you wont get any lower than 20.

[Hammm]

you shold try get one of the floppy drives with a Media disk combo, may come in handy and usually cost the same