creating a RAID setup

[Destroyer^]

ok i have a 160gb western digital sata 300 and a 36.7 gb raptor, now im thinking that RAID 0 would be the best for these as it will be used for raptor=windows and western digital for games etc. im wondering when creating a raid bootup disk should i make the nvidia raid disk or the silicon image one? it says you can use either one in the manual.
any advice on which raid setup and which raid bootable disk i shld use?

[nichomach]

Theoretically, you could increase disk performance by implementing RAID0, but you would of course need an additional hard disk - either the Raptor or the WD would need to be paired with another of the same type. Even then, I would query whether it was worth the expense to achieve a very marginal performance gain. It's also worth noting that if either drive fails in a RAID0 array, the data on that array is gone. There is NO redundancy in a RAID0 setup. I earnestly advise against it. The increase in risk of data loss just isn't worth risking for at best a slim increase in disk performance; note that, not overall system performance, just disk performance.

As to which disk you should use to install the drivers (you wouldn't be using a bootable floppy, you'd be using a floppy with the drivers on at the appropriate time in the XP install), it would depend on which controller you were running the array off.

[Destroyer^]

so shld i go for any RAID at all or just use them as seperate disks on a sata 1 and 2? also
im wondering which controller would be better if i was to go fora raid setup

[Splash]

What he said. If you need to run a RAID 0 array then for God's sake make sure you keep good backups. Or do what I do and run a RAID 5 array instead - saying that I doubt you'd be able to do that without investing in another controller, and you certainly wouldn't be able to do that without another couple of disks.

For more info on RAID array types goto http://www.acnc.com/raid.html