Can you give some system specs, or enable them to be viewed from your forum control panel?
The basic method goes like this:
1. If you have any important data on the current drive, back it up to a CD, DVD or whatever method you have available.
2. Install both SATA drives, one drive on port 1 and one on port 2 (this may change depending on your mobo make/model)
3. Go into the system BIOS and make sure the SATA controller is enabled (should be if you already have one drive up & running)
4. Make sure both channels (ports) are enabled on the SATA controller.
5. Save and exit the BIOS
6. Reboot the computer and re-enter the BIOS. Make sure both drives are seen in the Basic setup screen
7. Enable Raid for the SATA controller (on some boards you need to enable all SATA ports and enable raid for all ports even if you don't want to raid all drives). Save, exit and reboot
8. Go past the BIOS post screen, then enter the bios for the Raid controller. At this point you will probably need to build the array
- Select the type of raid you want (raid 0 = striping, raid 1 = mirroring)
- Select the stripe size you want. For most systems, best performance will come at a 16k stripe size
- Select both drives and add them to the array (you may have to do one drive at a time)
- Go to Proceed (or whatever command completes the build process)
- Most times you will need to make sure that the disk data has been cleared if the controller BIOS allows it. This will avoid issues with the original data from the first drive causing problems with the array.
If using the array as a boot drive, at this point you can go on to install windows (in XP you have to hit F6 to load the drivers for the raid controller - sometimes two drivers - from a floppy disk). If using the new array with a previous installation on another drive, you can just go into windows, install the drivers, and setup (initialize) the array.
It sounds a lot harder than it really is. I've done it at least half a dozen times in the past couple of years.
