Folks,
as a data storage drive I have two 250 Gig SATA drives in Raid 0 configuration so D drive is 500Gigabytes. I plan to reinstall the XP OS on the C drive. Will the controller and composite drive remain unchanged during the process or will the data need to be backed up to asimple drive?
Ronan

Also as these drives have 16 megs of Cache each giving 32 megs altogether would loading the operqating system on this drive increase performance of my system compared to usinng a ATA- 7200 traditional drive as that is what C is. Making it simpler. When there is a choice between putting the OS on ATA or SATA drives which is better for 1. performance 2. Stability?

Will the controller and composite drive remain unchanged during the process or will the data need to be backed up to a simple drive?

Is the raid controller software or hardware and is it on-board or on a card?

True hardware controllers shouldn't be affected but its always wise to backup data before doing any kind of repartitioning/reformatting and so on - particularly with a raid-0 which is the most unstable and most likely array to render all data "unrecoverable".

Raid-0 is really there to improve performance rather than to increase capacity - since there are other ways to span volumes if that is all that is required. It does so at the expense of data-liability. Two Sata drives as a raid-1 (mirror) would be much more appropriate for data storage and you would see little loss of performance into the bargain; its just that you would drop to the capacity of the smallest drive in the array eg 250GB.

paul,
raid controller is hardware and it is on a card.
I backed it up beforehand. Reloaded operating system and composite drive was missing. Downloaded card drivers and loaded. All data on raid o drive is readable and I am delighted. No harm in taking the precaution all the same.
Thanks for your help. As I am a pro photographer and access large 30 meg images for editing all the tima I assume raid o helps with joint cache of 32Mb between the two drives. I am using folder clone to run a backup every 30 minutes so am happy enough. let me know if this is sound thinking and how does one span volumes without Raid 0?

Ronan

To be honest it's only something I've read about and hardly tried at all but you can span drives by changing their format to a dynamic configuration under Win2K/XP.

This is a software solution of course, but the files get written as if it is one big volume rather than being constantly split (or striped) between the multiple volume - thus making recovery of data easier should a fault develop.