Quick question:

I have 3 HDD's in my computer. I initally had OSX on RAID0. I go to install Bootcamp for XP but am told I cannot whilst OSX is RAID0.

So.....(and thanks Apple for not advising in advance) I reinstall OSX on one HDD and XP is now on another HDD.

I now wish to RAID0 OSX. Can I do this now without having to reinstall OSX. If I have to reinstall OSX will I now lose the Boot partition that allows me to boot into XP?

Hell I wish Apple could advise in advance. I would assume the number of people that use Bootcamp that have RAID setups to be moderate, so surely they could have included this in the pdf that comes with the Bootcamp instructions (nb it is on their FAQ though)

Anyway your comments appreciated.

Yep, this can be done. Of course, you need 2 drives for RAID. And remember to backup your data first.
A great guide for doing this can be found here - http://www.afp548.com/article.php?st...RAID2-in-Depth

Are apple ever going to do hardware RAID? What are the third-party cards like if you want SATA RAID in a mac pro?

(sorry for the hijack)

I doubt it. A good hardware RAID (Apple of course would not use a shitty one) is quite expensive. Although you can get main board in the PC world with these built in, they are limited and use the CPU for RAID algorithm processing.
I haven't seen any PCI Express SATA RAID cards under $1000 in Aus yet, but I am sure they will come. OS X's AppleRAID 2 is actually quite good for mirror setups and because of their code and the power of the quad core, RAID transactions hardly effect overall performance.

Edit: Found a card here.

Thanks for the article - umm.... it is a bit beyond me - termnal is somewhere I fear to tread. Any other possible way?

Diskutil will not let me create a RAID0 from it's GUI.

In answer to your original question, no, you can't RAID0 two drives without deleting all the data on both those drives.

True, but you can RAID 1 without losing data - follow my link above.
Chrissara, Disk Utility will not allow you to create the mirror in a non destructive way, you will need to use the CLI to do this.

Okay - so for a RAID0 I have to reinstall OSX.

Will this now affect my ability to boot XP?

Certainly will...

As remembering XP is merely a partitation on the first drive, and you have to wipe this to do a raid0 of 2 drives.

It would be my guess bootcamp won't support this, so you either have no raid0 or no bootcamp

Should be no problem. Once you have set up your RAID 0, go ahead and do you Boot Camp and Windows install.
But really, why would you want to stripe your boot disk? You are really asking for trouble. You are doubling your chance of data loss as you would have two drives that will sooner or later fail and when this happens you will instantly lose your data. With RAID 1 you will easily be able to swap a failed drive out and rebuild the mirror.

I strongly suspect that the drivers used for RAID0 in OSX wont be compatible with the same RAID0 in Windows, so I doubt it would work. What do you want to boot from a RAID0 for anyway? I'm guessing the answer is "speed", but is there any special need?

It's not going to work, as the software raid used by OSX is going to be unknown by windows if you even get bootcamp to make a partitation for Windows after reinstalling OSX onto the raid0.

Currawong makes a good point. Although the stripe should just been seen as one logical drive, Windows will likely freak out. Maybe choose another volume to install Windows onto. The latest version of Boot Camp should allow this (or maybe I have been smoking crack...).

So even though my XP installation is on Disk3, I will lose the ability to boot into XP on Disk3 if I reinstall OSX as a striped set (RAID0) on Disk1 and Disk2? Rememeber I have three disks with XP on a separate HDD.

Would a Boot utility do the trick?

NB Forgot to add I have the drivers from the latest Bootcamp.