I have recently bought 2x 40GB HDD's, 2 different manufacturers, both 7200rpm.

I don't have RAID Controller on my motherboard or a PCI RAID controller.

Can I still setup RAID 0 on Windows XP and is there anyway to do a clean install so that Windows XP runs on the striped HDD's as opposed to on a seperate HDD?

Thanks for any help!

P.S. Any guides?

One question for you - why?

as mentioned by mrjones... why?

software raid would probably be slower than running the discs separate.

also you wouldnt be-able to have a bootable array thru software.

if you want to do it its control panel/administrative tools/compter management then the disc management section.

youll need to convert both discs to dynamic discs and then create a stripeset

A slightly more helpful post this time (I hope).

Was in extra speed or space that you wanted when using the two drives?

If it was space, then you could install WINXP on the C: drive, then all the additional programs on D:\Program Files\etc.

I've set my machine with the virtual memory on a different drive to Windows itself but I've no idea if that makes any speed difference really.

the swapfile on a different drive if on a physical different drive rather than a partition will speed things up a bit

i'm running 2 drives on 2 seperate channels, i'm going to put windows on c:\, program files & other content on d:\, since windows cannot be striped the partition size will be 10GB, d:\ will be 68 GB Striped and z:\ 2GB Swap file (1gb on each).

This I believe is a good compromise as I dont have a RAID controller. I can run windows on it's own, then all the appz will be sriped including the swap file.

does this make sense?

Wouldn't personally recommend installing program files on a separate drive from Windows because you'd be asking for registry and shared files problems. Keep your data on a different drive by all means (lots of advantages), but it's best keep all your programs and your OS together IMHO...

Plus, by the sounds of things, you'll have a reasonable amount of space on both drives if you keep the OS and program files on one and your data on the other.

RAID is really meant as a tool for disaster recovery AFAIK (mirrored drives, hot-swapping, etc.) so I'm not sure it'd do what you want. If Windows crashes and needs to be re-installed, you'd need to re-install all your program files anyway, so keeping them on a separate drive doesn't really help. And anyway, it's the data that needs protecting really, as the OS and program files can always be re-installed from the original disks whereas your documents can't (unless you back them up of course...)

Or at least that's what my experience and book-learning says to me...

RAID is really meant as a tool for disaster recovery AFAIK (mirrored drives' date=' hot-swapping, etc.) [/quote']

Redundancy is only one of its uses ... have you ever tried writing to a single disk at even 1Gb/s ???? 'tis not possible ... even with scsi. Now try at 10Gb/s ? So far the best we've managed is about 7.7 ish Gb/s. During Supercomputing we took part in a bandwidth challenge and the official figures showed a transfer rate of 131Gb/s over 17 10Gb/s links. to put this into perspective this is 2 full DVD9's per second. This wouldn't have been possible without RAID.

I am aware of ways to alter the registry to recognize program files etc is on D:\ instead of C:\ - a quick google search sorted that.

i'll post a link with my findings after i run a benchmark test later.

I take it these are the ****ed drives you mentioned earlier.

Forget RIAD. You are wasting your time mate.

Get new drives, copy the info across and Bin the ****ed ones full stop.

no, I have 2 perfectly ok ones, and 2 dodgy, I was considering RAID 0 on striped across 4 drives but i'll just stick to my 2 working ones now.