So a couple weeks ago one of my harddrives came up with a S.M.A.R.T. error, which ment that I should be looking into backing up the device data and replace the unit. I did so, but while at it I figured an upgrade might be in order as well.
I am fairly lucky in that my motherboard had an onboard RAID controller which let me do either RAID 0, 1, 0+1, or RAID 5. I ended up getting two Western Digital Raptor Drives, and rebuilt the system into a RAID 0 array.
I must admit that I didn't expect a lot of of problems, but this is what I ran into.
Getting the drives in, powered up, and configured under the RAID controller proved to be a little bit of a problem. It turned out that there were two RAID controllers on this motherboard; a Silicon Image Controller, and an nVidia Controller. Getting the drives into the right configuration, with the proper driver and getting Windows XP to recognize them took a couple of tries.
The documentation for my RAID controller wasn't very good, so over a couple hours of trial and error, driver builds, and boot disks, I finally manage to get the right configuration.
DATA throughput is through the roof. Boot time went from being on an IDE ATA Drive at 7200RPM of roughly 1 minute, to two 10,000RPM RAID IDE SATA to roughly 20 seconds.
Desktop load-out is great, takes about 15 seconds on Desktop to get everything up and running.
All and all; lack of documentation was the bigger problem. But everything is now running great.
