Is this Raid 1 possible?

[HRMaddie]

Not sure if this is possible, just wondering if I can do this?

Currently I have two separate 80 gig hard drives. Is it possible, using a Raid 133 pci controller card to Raid 1 mirror my C & F drives onto one larger drive? Will I still be able to boot from the C drive? Essentially can I use three hard drives, two 80s (operating system on C and files on F) and 1 200 (mirror C & F) to create a Raid array?

[shelbyGT]

I thought that a raid 1 figuration was when one drive mirrored the other but you only had the storage capacity of one drive.

i could be wrong, and probably am. I didn't bother to look it up.

[Capmaster]

Raid0 stripes the two drives and the resulting drive is the sum.
Raid1 is mirroring and the resulting drive is the size of only one of the drives.

[ViRaL1]

I'm not sure if this is what you're asking, but I'll take a shot at it. If you have an ATA RAID controller you can create a RAID0 stripe set of 2 80GB drives totalling 160GB. SOME RAID controllers will allow you to mirror that stripe with your 200GB drive, but you'll lose 40GB of storage space if you mirror. If your controller doesn't support it, you may be able to (not sure which versions of XP support this out of the box) use the 200GB drive to mirror the 160GB stripe in software. Either way, you'll still be losing 40GB of storage space and in the end you'll be getting a total of 160GB of storage space out of 2 80GB drives and 1 200GB drive, but at least it will be a bit safer.

[rallynavvie]

That used to be my situation for a while, two 80GB and one 200GB drives and a RAID card. I ended up mirroring the two 80GB for redundancy and used the 200GB for storage. But honestly I'd just leave all three seperate, they're a bit more useful that way.

[HRMaddie]

I think what I am going to do is Raid 1 my 80 gig hard drive that has my o/s, pictures and documents and use my 250 gig hd for video and various other things. I am going to have to puchase a PCI Raid controller card, any one better than the other. I am looking at purchasing a Highpoint, but the only way to update the chipset is via a 3.5" disk, which I don't have a 3.5 disk" on my computer.

[ViRaL1]

You should probably pick up an FDD. If your BIOS supports it, wally world has USB floppy drives for $40 and you can use them with multiple systems. I'm not sure if this is what you mean by 'updating the chipset', but you'll need a floppy drive to install the RAID controller during Window$ setup if your boot drive is running on it.