I am setting up my Father's P5W DH Deluxe for his video editing. While looking for some info on how to set up the RAID, I came across something that I don't know whether to believe or not.
Is it possible to set up one volume on a set of two discs as RAID 0, and another, on the same set of discs as RAID 1?
Would this make it look like two seperate discs? One striping and one mirroring?
Would the recovery of the mirrored section be the same as if it were mirroring the whole disc?

Can I get some of whatever you've been smoking?
No,on second thought...

Can I get some of whatever you've been letting slowly dissolve on your tongue?

Well I'm no expert LOL........but I'm gonna take that to mean no heh.

Why say things in one word when you can do it in many. I will take it as a no as well then.

OK, I'll expand..

The purpose of a RAID array is one of two things, both of which would be rendered useless in what was proposed.

Data integrity:
This is accomplished by the "mirroring" of data onto a second HDD, such that if one of the drives fails, the data is still available from the other.
If the data is mirrored to the same drive, how is data integrity accomplished...drive failure ---> all the data goes to bit heaven.

Improved performance:
Faster data reads/writes are accomplished by "striping" the data across two (or more) HDDs, effectively using two write heads and two platters at the same time. Faster data writes are accomplished by simultaneously writing 1/2 of the data to each of two different HDDs. Faster data reads are accomplished by simultaneously reading 1/2 of the data from each of two different HDDs. If all the data is written/read on one HDD it would take the same amount of time a non-Raid setup would take to write/read data.

As for what was proposed actually functioning, it may, ....but to what end? I have no idea how you would convince windows to do it though. Someone with a lot of time on their hands want to try this? It is an interesting question.

This is what I found. Am I reading it correctly, as in what I said above. I am not even going to try, just stay with RAID 0 and back up important stuff to another drive.


Step 1: Put the P5W Dh Deluxe disk in your CD/DVD drive also put the floppy in floppy A.

Step 2: Reboot, go into BIOS if you need to make your first boot drive the one you have the P5W DH Deluxe disk in. Then boot from the disk.

Step 3: Make the Raid driver disk. The CD will boot into a menu that will give you 4 drivers to write to floppy A. I'm guessing you have a 32 bit processor so choose A.) Make Intel ICH7 32bit

Step 4: After you write the necessary files to your floppy disk reboot

Step 5: During boot up it should take you to a screen that says hit CTRL-I, hit CTRL-I to config your RAID.

(I have 2 x 250 GB hard drives too and I set them up as follows I have two partitions. First partion I have in RAID0 for the OS and programs its a 50GB partition I wish I would have gone a little bigger however. The second is a 200GB RAID1 for storage. You can set this up however you want. However you don't really want to go above 80 GB partitions for RAID0 because you start to lose preference.)

Step 6: Once that's set up insert the Windows XP install disk and reboot. Hit F6 during set up to install the ICH7 32bit drivers from the floppy you created earlier. After that everything should go swimmingly.