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Adding SATA II RAID storage to DAW Computer

I am building a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for live recording. I am trying to get the whole system pulled together. I can't seem to be able to figure out how to get the whole thing up and running. I am excpecially having trouble trying to get my RAID 0 storage working.

I have a Intel D945GNT mobo that supports SATA II and two 190GB 300 Mbp/s Seagate drives. I got XP installed onto the raid array, but I decided that I wanted to install XP onto an IDE drive and use the SATA array for dedicated use for audio recording. I can't seem to install XP with the SATA array connected wothout the system bluescreening with the following message:
*** STOP: 0x0000007E (0xc0000005, 0xF748E0BF, 0xF78DA208, 0xF78D9F08)

*** pci.sys - Address F7487000, DateStamp 3b7d855c

This happens with no PCI cards installed.

Does anyone have any advice how to get this system pulled together? I am wondering if I would be better off installing xp to the ide drive I plan to use, then activating the raid array. I need some step by step instructions.

Thanks.

scrathcyboy

Well, this is not quite the right way to do it. On the new MBs the SATA RAID is meant to be the boot device. So you should make that the bootable drive. Also your RAID 0 choice is wrong for a small system. RAID 0 does give faster writes (the performance difference is not worth the risk, however). When one drive fails in a RAID 0, you LOSE EVERYTHING !!!. You should be using RAID 1, which is a MIRROR -- so if one drive fails, the other drive will take over, and you LOSE NOTHING!!! Is that not worth the extra writes to the RAID 1 array?

So once you realize this, you set RAID 1 as the primary SATA RAID array, then use the IDE drive as an extra backup drive. Now you have a DUAL drive for the OS, PLUS a backup - using this, you will NEVER lose your data.

Now, on to the digital recording, does the size of ALL the digital files exceed the SATA drive size? If so, you need to consider an extra drive setup to save the extra data. What do you have in mind?

stafi

do you use xp sp2 ? if you dont try to get a copy of xp sp 2 than reinstall. if you cant get xp sp2 cd than look here:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

sound2man

ASKER

I am using xp SP2.

Are you saying that it will not work to use an IDE drive as the boot drive? I am using raid 0 for speed. The audio files will then be backed up to wither DVD or an external HD. Reliablitity in this instance, is less important then speed. I was really hoping to stay away from recording to the same drive(s) as the os was on, but if there is no alternative, I will have to do it. I still don't understand why the computer was bluescreening.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

scrathcyboy

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