I just bought a couple of identical HD's and I'd like to set them up in a RAID 0 and keep the OS on my existing HD. In keeping with the instructions for my Rampage Extreme board, I went into the BIOS and configured the storage configuration as SATA, then in a different menu, I picked the two new drives and specified RAID 0. When I did so, my PC promptly stopped working since the existing HD with the OS no longer appeared, even in the boot priority menu, and the two new drives were obviously empty. So is there a way to do this, to have the OS on a single (old) drive and other (new) drives set up in RAID, or does RAID require doing everything from scratch? (by the way, I was able to easily undo the RAID configuration, so I didn't lose anything)Thanks!

Try setting the bios to raid mode. Then setup your raid in the next bios section. Once the raid is setup, reenter the system bios and setup your optical as the 1st and the single bootable HD as the second. The mfg bootable CD will then recognize both the raid and the single as drives. You can then format the new raid. Then boot from your existing drive. Get the Intel Matrix Storage Consule right away and enable the drive cache function for the new raid. That matters. But be advised, the raid won't help much with FS. It will load the program faster, but gameplay won't be positively effected. Nor will running FS on a separate drive, raid or not. A suggestion might be to use the raid as the main drive for everything and the single for an image backup location. That's the way I run it. The raid really does perk-up overall system responsiveness.

Does your motherboard have more than 1 SATA controller? If so, I suggest you make sure the new drives you intend to stripe are plugged into a different controller than the non-striped drive, just to avoid potential conflicts. This could be why your original drive is no longer showing up in the BIOS, if the controller is incorrectly configured for RAID.

Hey guys,it turns out, and this came as a big surprise to me, that if you ever want to set up a mobo-controlled raid configuration, then you have to specify a raid setup before you install the OS, even if you plan to have the OS on a non-raid drive. Or so says a poster on the ASUS forum. Can you confirm this?

Could be. My initial install to my Asus P5K was to a raid. 1) I set the HD mode to raid in the bios, saved the bios, 2) Then built the raid in the next bios setup screen. I had 4 drives installed and selected my 3/250s as the raiders. The 4th (750) was left as a my backup single. 3) Once the raid was established, it was recognized as the C drive and the op system installed normally to the raid. The 4th remained an available, single, non-bootable data drive. (Could I have reversed this choice? Don't remember. Maybe.) As an raid v non-raid experiment, I imaged the raid to a directory actually on the raid drive, then set that image over to the single (via a bootable CD). I had - Bad - experiences having 2 bootable drives onboard at the same time, so I physically unplugged the 3 raided drives. I then went back into the bios and reset it to IDE. The single booted without issue. Where ever you want to go, you can get there. But it may not be a straight line. However I would Not suggest having 2 cloned/identical drives live/online a single mobo. I've had a confused bios frag 'em both. NTDLR missing or some such (terminal) nonsense - on both - . Main And Backup DOA. You can get 'em back, but avoid the moment . . . Ugh.

Do yourself a favor, if you're squeezing all the peformance you can out of a box for FS, and you must be, otherwise why would anyone bother with all the trouble and increase in potential of raid corruption/failures and the increased need of backups? Get yourself a dedicated hardware raid controller and shutdown the onboard raid controllers to free up CPU cycles. You'll get better peformace with the 256k stripe only offered on hardware raid cards, and at the same time, cut CPU overhead.I finally took the plunge after years of swapping b/w single ACHI drive modes and raid-0 setups using the onboard controllers. There is no comparison and the prices are dropping to a very reasonable price. The other advantage is I can easily move/migrate the card foward as I upgrade/rebuild CPU's. The discussion of what I bought and how I set it up:http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=28350Regards,

thanks for all the suggestions guys/gals. For now, I think I'll forego the raid and simply run FSX on a single dedicated raptor and see how that goes. If I ever do go raid, however, I think I've read enough to know to use a dedicated hardware card.Happy flying!