Intel RAID configuration utility main menu is shown on Figure 11. This screen will show up after you press Control I while the text shown on Figure 9 appears after you turn on your computer.

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Figure 11: RAID configuration utility.

All RAID utilities are very similar and very easy to use. In our example the main screen shows information about the hard disk drives and presents four options. Select the first one, Create RAID Volume, to setup your RAID system. The screen shown on Figure 12 will be shown.

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Figure 12: Creating your RAID system.

Here you will have to configure:

• Volume Name: The name under which your operating system will access your RAID system.
• RAID Level: The RAID type you want, RAID0 (data striping, for improving performance) or RAID1 (mirroring, for improving reliability). Other RAID types will be available depending on the RAID chip you have.
• Disks: For selecting the disks you want to include in this RAID array.
• Strip size: This is the size of the data chunks your RAID system will use. Roughly speaking, this is like the size of each “sector” your hard disk drive will use. The ideal size is subject of a lot of debate. Generally speaking, bigger stripes are better if you work with big files, while smaller stripes are better if you work with small files. If you don’t have a clue on what value to use, leave it on its default size (usually 64 KB or 128 KB). Click here to read a performance test we did using several different stripe sizes.
• Capacity: Here you can configure a lower capacity in order to create more than one RAID volume (like if you were “partitioning” your RAID array, i.e. creating two or more “RAID drives”). For example, instead of having just one 160 GB array we could configure one 100 GB array and another with 50 GB, so the operating system will recognize them as separated disks, even though both will be using the RAID system.

After hitting “Create Volume” a confirmation screen will be shown, remembering that all your data will be lost. Hit “Y” and your RAID will be created.

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Figure 13: Confirmation screen.

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Figure 14: Main menu, now with our RAID array created.

You can see our RAID array created on Figure 14. As you can see we created a RAID0 (striping) system.

Now that our RAID system is created, you will need to install the operating system. This is the trickiest part of the RAID setup process.