Raid and weird SATA question.

[BWVictorious]

Heyas
I recently got myself a full new computer but I just realised I might have made a huge mistake.

I always had a 30gig drive and to be honest, thought sometimes it was a bit too little, I usually didnt mind the space constraints.
Therefore I didnt bother with getting 2 huge hardrives, I just got one a 320 Gb Western Digital WD3200YS RE, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms and decided that I was quite ok.
I also partitioned the drive giving me a 100gb slot to save things just in case I wanted to format the main drive.

However I noticed 2 huge mistakes:
1- the computer indicates that my SATA II drive is attached storage... I even have the small icon in the system tray that allows me to disconnect the drive (just like your basic usb drive). This looks pretty stupid to me as a small mistake can screw up everything (doubt its healthy to disconnect the only hdd in the machine). Have I made a mistake in the setting somewhere or is this "normal"?

2- RAID... my motherboard has a RAID controller so I might be wasting some nice technology by using a single hardrive. I recently read about RAID and RAID0 seems to give the system a nice performance boost. Space I have plenty and speed isnt too bad so my question is: is it worth it to upgrade to RAID0 by boosting up my machine with a second hardrive? Does the harddrive has to be a matching make and model (and what about size?) If I can plug any hardrive and raid them then I probably be better off waiting for a drop in prices and then using it to boost my now old machine.

3 (Just thought of this one). Although my motherboard is SLI and my graphics card is SLI enabled, I only have one graphics card (planning to get a second on when prices go low and game requirements go high). However everytime I log in I get a small balloon complaining that SLI is not enabled because there is only one card in the system. Cant I disable it?

Thanks for the attention guys!
Yours Truly
K

[Steve B]

1) My machine used to do that, not sure if it still does, although i think so. I tried disconnecting it once using safely remove hardware and it wouldn't let me so afaik its not really that much of a problem
2) If your using Raid 0 then u can use a different size of disk but ull only get the maximum capacity of twice the size of the smaller of the two, as the data is shared equally between the drives.
3) What is ur motherboard model? When i got my sli board, i had a "shadow" card that i had to insert into the other SLi slot so that it wouldn't think i was running SLi. Not sure if theres something like that with ur computer.

[shaithis]

1 = nVidia IDE drivers. Thats jsut the way they work

2...I would never use a motherboards on-board RAID controller, they are pretty crap

3 = a bug in the 91.31 drivers. 91.33 has been released to fix it.

[Agent]

Points have been covered brilliantly above, but just to add - the reason why you get that icon (number 1) is that SATA drives are hot-swappable.
Provided its not the windows drive, you can just "stop" the HD and unplug it with the system still on. Very handy
Don’t worry about it being on your windows drive - it simply will not let you do it

[-ChEM-]

1. if you had other non-system drives or a raid1 you would be able to use that feature, theres nothing wrong with it except for the fact that its useless for you

2. you wont notice any improvement except when reading large files, small files will be about the same or even slightly worse as the average access time increases (you need to have both drives in the right position rather than just one)... cpu usage will go up whenever you access the hard drives (2gb ram is good to reduce the level of HDD access)

so you will be making small compromises... if you do anything thats HDD intensive its probably worth it, if you do a lot of gaming i wouldnt bother at all although the performance penalty will hardly be noticable given the gpu power you need these days

and the likelihood of losing all your data in a given time period doubles as youve got 2 drives that could go wrong instead of just one

[BWVictorious]

Hey Guys!
Thanks for your assistance.
Ill update my drivers then to get rid of the SLI warning.

As for Raid0 Ill just leave it for a possible upgrade in a few years (maybe)

thanks!