RAID 0 Setup

If you've gotten this far, when you reboot after the driver installation, you will have one of the five hard drives available. Figure 10 shows what your XP "My Computer" will look like once the adapter driver is installed. You can see the NORCO-4618 installation CD in the D: drive. Then you see "Local Disk (E:)" which is the 2nd (?) disk of the 5 in the external drive cage.

Figure 10: XP My Computer with Adapter Driver Loaded

To set up a stripe / RAID 0 set, you need to run the Windows Disk Manager (right mouse button click on My Computer, then select Manage, then select Disk Management). When you do this, Disk Manager will see new drives and immediately prompt you with the "Welcome to the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard." Cancel the disk wizard, let Disk Manager load, and take a look at what your computer sees of the five new disks attached. Figure 11 is what my XP machine looked like.

Figure 11: Disk Manager View of the DS-500 with adapter driver installed

To build a stripe array, you convert all disks to "dynamic" (right mouse click on the left column of each disk and choose Make Dynamic) and then create a partition (right mouse click on the right column of each disk icon and choose New Partition). After all the disks are Dynamic (on the left column) and Unallocated (on the right column), you can right click on the disk icon in the left column and see the menu in Figure 12. You then choose New Volume ... .

Figure 12: Creating Stripe (RAID0) Volume

Tags: DAS, NAS, Norco,

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