Darrell Collins

I am about to Re-install Windows XP on my computer.... My plan is to use 2 40GB IDE drives in RAID 0 mode to install and get everthing running. Updates, drivers, etc. Once everything is up and running perfect, I will use Acronis True Image 10 to copy everything to my 2 160GB SATA drives operating RAID 0. Then I will pull the IDE drives and save them as back-up in case my SATA drives become corrupted.

(I tried installing directly to the SATA drives and they wound up with drive letter K:, with no IDE drives except 2 DVD drives installed) Go figure! The computer found 4 "USB removable drives" somewhere.... none are connected... Ghost drives, I guess.

Anyhow, my computer has 2 IDE connections... My Question is this: For RAID purposes, should both hard drives be installed as masters on each of the cables and both DVD drives installed as slaves, OR should both Hard drives be installed on the primary IDE cable as master and slave and the 2 DVD drives installed on the secondary IDE cable as master and slave? Or does it even make a difference?

Thanks in advance for any advice someone can give me on the question.

smz

generally when someone asks about installing two drives on the same chain I shy away from it, but since this is a raid scenario, I would think your best bet is to chain them on the same master/primary & slave cable. This is because when putting the DVD ROM's on the other end of each cable, there is always a chance of slow down. At least these are what I've experienced in the past. I've made the move completely off IDE and deal strictly with SATA and SCSI now where this is not an issue any longer. But in case you don't already know. Depending on where you put these drives will affect the jumpers on at least one drive and in some cases both drives.

If you put them on the same chain, one is jumped as master (with slave present) and the other is just Slave.

If you hook them both up on the primary master portion of each IDE chain, then they are both just jumped as a master... I never use CS though maybe there are some folks who like it, but I like to have control of things more.

I don't think you mentioned if you were using a hardware raid card or onboard bios solution, but in the case of a fresh install, you need to hit F6 when the cd-rom is loading the operating system installer which will then prompt you for the raid preinstall floppy driver. Also keep in mind, if you have addional storage on your computer and it could even be disabled in your bios, XP can pick up their scent. Make sure you have a clean slate with just those two raid hard drives... (Optical ROM drives don't affect it)

If you've got a good hardware raid setup, that Acronis software works awesome but if you are planning on transferring an existing install of an OS that is linked to a system without these two raided drives, it probably is not going to fireup and give you a "boot disk missing error"

I don't have experience with this but if you run a sysprep on the operating system before shutting it down for the acronis transfer, that may get around this hiccup but the fact that you are introducing a new raid drive to the operating system may also affect it. I'll wait for more input on what your situation is and how you are trying to accomplish this feat. I just transferred from a single SCSI drive setup to a 600GB SATA Raid (300gb x 2) and I get well over 100mb/sec sustained. This easily beat my 10K SCSI single drive and the drives nowadays are whisper quiet. So with my new Antec Nine Hundred case and the SATA drives, my office is litterally silent now.