i have one of these in my system, how do i actually use it, can i not just plug another hard drive in and just use it as another eide slot for an extra HHD? or do i need to identical hhd? and use it another way?
If you're not running Linux or another UNIX variant, you'll need a hardware RAID controller. Microsoft has removed any useful form of software-driven RAID from their non-server OSes, although Windows 2000 does have RAID-0 support out-of-the-box. Otherwise you'll need a hardware RAID controller. Here is a description RAID and the different forms thereof. All the best, -AT
what i want to know is "can i use my raid card purely as an ide slot, i dont want to raid anything, just plug hdd in as a stand alone drive, so i can have extra storage?
ok at, if so how do i set it up? i plugged it in and nowt showed up, do i have to go in to a bios or what????????
It should be recongized by BIOS, but you'll have to format it. Under Windows 2k/XP, you can do this by the following: Right-click 'My Computer' --->Manage. Go to 'Disk Management'. You can see all your drives (removeable, optical, hard drives) here, even ones that aren't formatted. If you right click on a drive, you should have an option to format it. You're best off to use NTFS unless you've got a 10GB or smaller hard drive as far as what filesystem to use when the option comes up.
