RAID 0 question

[Guest]

hello, i have 4 hard disks (2 are IDE, 2 are SATA) I have the one of the
Ide's for the operating system and one for backup and the sata's are raided
together through the operating system (no third party drivers etc). Ide like
to raid the ide's using raid 0 also and i have the raid card but im wondering
that if i format the os to do it will i lose all the data on my sata's? (as
the raid on them is tied to the operating system) Thanks in advance for any
help u can offer.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Using software RAID means you have converted the disks to dynamic. This
means that yes there is a possibility that if you lose the OS you will also
lose access to the array. When you reinstall Windows both the disks in the
array will show up as foreign disks. The procedure to import a RAID 0 array
is not very straightforward and it is easy to lose the data on both disks in
the process. If you must use RAID 0 it is much better to use a hardware
controller. Personally I don't recommend RAID 0 except in very special
cases. The performance increase isn't perceptible during normal use and the
possibility of data loss is too great.