Never done RAID before and I want to RAID 0, any help?

[Bradley_Whelan]

Basically I want an SSD because hard drives are too slow, I've used them all my life and never even used an SSD, but it's sooooooooooo slow, at the moment just loading games and viewing photos(i do a lot of editing I have like 10GB of photos) takes so long and is just really slow

But SSDs are expensive for any decent amount of storage though, so I was thinking of getting 2x250GB drives and making a total of 500GB in RAID 0, getting half-decent read and writes for all my steam games, photos, music etc.

What do I need to do this? do I need any 250GB drives, do they need to be the same model? do I need a raid controller?

I understand it's easy to loose all your data on RAID 0 but I have a 1TB drive and a 200GB drive and I backup all my important things on both drives, I just want this for steam and editing.

I've never set up RAID before and I only learned what it really is about 6 months ago.

[marv1336]

First YES you need the SAME MODEL ssd for raid 0, then a raid controller it depends on your mobo, tell us wich one it is.

I made a raid 0 of Vertex 4 and it was a piece of cake, never worked with raid before that, and the speed is amazing.

[Helltech]

They do NOT have to be the same model, lol. You can even raid-0 a 60gb drive with a 256gb drive, though the raid array will only be 120gb. Which would obviously not be good, just giving you an example.

[Ssoele]

They do NOT have to be the same model, lol. You can even raid-0 a 60gb drive with a 256gb drive, though the raid array will only be 120gb. Which would obviously not be good, just giving you an example.

It indeed doesn't have to be, but it works better if they are.

[marv1336]

They do NOT have to be the same model, lol. You can even raid-0 a 60gb drive with a 256gb drive, though the raid array will only be 120gb. Which would obviously not be good, just giving you an example.

Sorry for that, I meant they SHOULD be the same model haha.

[Bradley_Whelan]

I meant 2 250GB hard drives but that's good to know, what do I need to RAID them?

[LimeDk]

go into your bios and then into your Storage Config and then config you sata into raid then save and go out of the bios and then you raid controller on your motherboard should start up and you will need to press CRTL + i and you should get into you raid controller and from there its pretty simple i would help if we knew what motherboard you had cause if you got a intel raid controller then its CRTL + i. and there is CRTL + F but you can see it when you boot

[Bradley_Whelan]

I have a MSi H61M-P31 with a Pentium G860 CPU

[JdoggC]

I don't think the H61 chipset has RAID.

:(

[Eric1024]

The h61 chipset on your motherboard doesn't support RAID, so you have a couple of options. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155#Original_Sandy_Bridge_chipsets << wiki article on intel chipsets showing that it doesn't have RAID, or as Intel calls it, Rapid Storage Technology.) You can either get a new motherboard with an H67 chipset, which is easy to find for around 80$ US give or take, OR you can get a raid card, which can be expensive and is prone to issues unless you want to spend the money for something more reliable. This will probably run you easily over 200$ for a good card. Your final option is to use software raid, which leverages your CPU for RAID calculations, and costs nothing. It will take a bit of cpu resources, but very little. Here's a guide on how to set up software RAID in windows 7 http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36504/how-to-create-a-software-raid-array-in-windows-7/.

[Bradley_Whelan]

aww crap, looks like I might as well get an SSD

thanks for the help though guys, I'll just get 250gb 840.