How to Setup a RAID System

Physical Installation

The RAID installation process is divided into three parts:

• Physical installation, where you install the hard disk drives on your PC in such a way that they will be able to be used as a RAID system.
• RAID configuration, where you setup the system to use the two hard disk drives as a RAID array.
• Operating system installation, where you need to install the operating system loading a special driver in order to recognize your RAID array.

It is very important to notice that the set up a RAID system deletes all data inside your hard disk drives. Make a backup of all your data before continuing if your hard disk drives contain important data.
The physical installation is pretty straightforward. Install your hard disk drives to your case, connect a power supply plug on each hard disk drive and connect each hard disk drive to the appropriate hard disk drive port on the motherboard. If your motherboard doesn’t support RAID, you will need to buy a RAID controller card and install your hard disk drives to it. Of course, this procedure must be done with your computer turned off.
In the pictures below, we removed the system from the case for clearer visibility. In this tutorial, we are using an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard and two Samsung HD080HJ hard disk drives (80 GB, SATA-300).
It is important to use ports that can deliver the maximum performance your hard disk drive is able to reach. There are two main hard disk interface standards, parallel ATA (PATA or simply IDE) and Serial ATA (SATA). PATA ports are fading away and are being replaced by SATA ports which are today’s standard. If you are assembling a new system, do not use parallel ATA hard disk drives.
Parallel ATA can be found in two speeds: ATA/100 and ATA/133. Of course, the best scenario if you are still using this kind of hard disk drive is to use ATA/133 drives together with ATA/133 ports. For the best performance, you need to install each hard disk drive on a separated port, each one configured as “master” and using its own 80-wire cable. Do not install them on the same cable using master/slave configuration as this reduces performance. Unfortunately, newer motherboards usually don’t have more than one parallel ATA port, making it a very bad choice to use parallel ATA hard disk drives.
Don’t forget that the parallel ATA ports must support RAID, of course. The parallel ATA ports shown in Figure 4 are not the ones controlled by the chipset. Instead, they are two extra IDE ports provided by an extra chip, supporting RAID.

Figure 4: The correct way of connecting PATA hard disk drives

Since parallel ATA is fading away, we are going to focus on Serial ATA.
Serial ATA can also be found in two speeds, SATA-150 (a.k.a. 1.5 Gbps) and SATA-300 (a.k.a. 3 Gbps). The best performance can be achieved with SATA-300 ports and SATA-300 hard disk drives.
The installation is pretty easy. Connect one SATA cable to each hard disk drive and connect one SATA power cable to each hard disk drive. If your power supply doesn’t have SATA power cables, SATA hard disk drives come with an adapter that converts the standard peripheral power plug into a SATA power plug.

Figure 5: Our two SATA hard disk drives with their cables installed

Then install the other end of each cable to an available SATA port on your motherboard. For better organization, use the lowest numbered ports. For example, on our motherboard, the four ports controlled by the ICH6R south bridge were labeled SATA0, SATA1, SATA2, and SATA3. We used SATA0 and SATA1 ports. Remember that you must install the cables to ports that support RAID (see previous page for a detailed discussion on this subject).

Figure 6: Installing the cables on the motherboard

Now you will need to set up the hard disk drives as a RAID array. Let’s show how this can be done in the next page.