Hard drive formatting question
 

This week I'm heading to a friends house to format his PC and help with setting everything back up.

Now, the way the person who built his computer did it was, he put in two 80gb drives, but used Raid or something (not too sure) and combined them into one drive. I plan on writing 0's to the drive(s) then stick XP pro on it, so how would I go about doing it? format it normaly? Can I de-seperate the drive? Maybe unplug one and stick the other as Master? =/

Also, he wants to know if he'll lose HD load speed or something, I'd guess at saying he'll load thigns faster cause it wont have to go between two drives to do it, but you're the experts here.

So just as a reminder, 2 80gb drives merged into one, wanting to zero the drive before installing windows, how would I do it.

try to use partition magic 8 is very cool,can do what you want.

You can just format it normally, unless you're concerned about the data being recovered by the FBI. RAID is ususally faster than two separate drives, in my experience. I run a ~400GB RAID striped array, and it's pretty fast.

A raid array made of two drives doesn't seem like such a good idea to me... Unless the drives are in mirror configuration, losing half the space you'd otherwise have, you're essentially doubling your chances of drive failure, since one drive failing will prevent you from using the other.

Perhaps there's something I just didn't notice?

So it would be best to "un-raid" them and put that back to two seperate drives?

Actually that's only as risky as using a single drive, the advantage is it's much faster and lumps the HDD space into one large 'drive'. If you use a single drive for all your important data, RAID 0 isn't any more dangerous than the common single drive setup (I know I was being redundant, but I wanted to drive my point in).

While I am unsure of the performance benefits on either side of the argument, RAID-0 over two drives is a nice way to make sure that you don't have fault tolerancy. If one drive in the set dies, goodbye everything: any added speed is not worth the chance of losing everything in the event of a singly drive failure. (Unless, of course, that speed is enough to overcome all other transfer methods, which I doubt.)

Alright. Now that its settled, how would I go about un-raiding the drive?

His motherboard is http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...76&modelmenu=1

Would it be in the bios? Some other menu that you'd get into upon startup?

yeah there should be a bios option you need to turn off. Then you should be good to go.