Raid issues

[JLM]

I have just bought the Gigabyte 8I945P-Pro, I am trying two set up two
SATA drives in raid 0 and am having problems every step of the way.
This is the first time I have tried to build a barebones system, as
such am
kind of learning on the job as it were.
I understand that if one drive fails you loose everything, so
it is twice as likely to happen, but will keep everything backed up.
Have connected my sata drives sequentially, but maybe this is
incorrect? I understand the basic theory behind Raid, but did not
realise that it only benefited certain applications, could you expand
on this (give me some examples?). Is XP able to install on a raid
array?
Or does the array need to be separate to the boot drive?
Have enabled the SATA
controller, and the Gigaraid function in the bios. Entered raid setup
(Ctrl I) and created my raid volume. And put the drivers on a floppy
(intel matrix - am assuming this is the correct one? - Intel chipset
ICH7R - if not this is probably my problem and could someone please
advise). Pressed F6 during windows installation, then loaded the
drivers, windows recognises the raid volume, and then formats. After
reboot, windows begins installing but fails (blue screen of death),
It loads most of the "Installing Devices" section and then comes up
with "Stop Error: 0x000000F4". Do you have any suggestions (other than
giving up that is).
Any help would be much appreciated, as I have said I am
fairly new to all this, so please bear with me if I'm making an obvious

mistake. Still don't understand why it recognises the volume, formats
it and then fails during the second boot.

 

[gs]

don't have soln but you want my experience with raid drives

I have set up one with Asus a8n vm csm at raid 5 with 3 drives. all
connected directly to the mainboard's ports. not through another drive

even then I found errors every now and then and have to rebuild the Raid.
Raid Drive seems to be more vulnerable to power loss and system hung damage
A drive of 80 GB is only about $90,200GB about 130 or less. I would go for
raid 5 instead of Raid 0. the 3rd drive acts the warning beacon so you can
fix before corruption sets in beyond repair


a controller with 4 ports is about $150
and you don't suffer performance loss for 3 drive RAID 3


Performance gains only for short burst of data. speed limited by the drive
itself. SCSI is always faster
inter drive copy and moving is still slow

 

[gs]

BTW
you may want to take a look at this
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330100