Its been a while since i bought hardware but i need a total upgrade for the HL episode 1.
how do i raid ? i was looking at these hard drives http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/104346/rb/19212681652 and this motherboad http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/66708 . will it work and how do i do it ?

(ok, get ready for people telling you not to raid and raid is evel - personally I love it)

its pretty easy to do

stick your new m/b in, connect the new drives into the raid sata connectors (might have some raid and non raid ones - theyll be marked as raid/non raid in the manual tho if they are)

when you turn the pc on, you should get something like "press escape/F3/etc.." to enter raid bios, so press it... you need to make a raid array here, the menues should be pretty self explanatory, therell only be like 4 options or something.

you need to re-install windows (to use these disks as the bood drive)

when your installing windows, you get a "Press F6 to add aditinal scsi or raid drivers"

you press F6 here

then put in the flopy drive that came with your m/b

click next, and after that its just like running with 1 drive



p.s. i just noticed that m/b doesent have any IDE connectors ?  is your current drive sata or ide ? its nice if you can connect your old drive in to save all your stuff, and to use as a backup drive for all your inportant stuff

remember to make the damned floppy before you start.  other than that its easy, and its fast.  The 133 PATA drives i use for my main array whip the SATA drive for performance, hence why the SATA is just a storage drive.

Another raid setup here

Just do as knighy said and it should work without a problem.

Something else you might want to do before you start is make sure your mobo has the latest bios, had issues getting raid to work on mine untill i did that.

Good luck

i want performance over anything. its going to be a gaming rig. what do u surggest ? no need to abck anything up as this is pure gaming. i have another rig for my work and stuff like that.

For performance over anything:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/55454

or

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/50948

nuff said

ok i think i will stick to wht i was goin to get in the first place. do i need a extra wire or anything ? thank for all the advice so far.

^^ for the raid ?

nope, the drives connect into the m/b just like normal

once you make the raid array in the bios thing, and spress F6 on windows install itll look in windows etc.. like theres just one drive there

Which RAID mode are you planning on using?
RAID0 = performance and 160GB (with those drives) but no redundancy
RAID1 = redundancy and slight performance gain on read access, but only 80GB

If you have a good backup routine or dont mind the risk factor go with RAID 0.

I would advise you to get Windows, etc installed then make a backup of the hard drive, in case the stripe fails. Other than that, it will be fast as expletive.

Personal preference would be raid 0 and get something like Acronis Trueimage to back up onto the old IDE drive.