Fresh installing Dell 9100... do I need RAID stuff 1157

To answer your question, I would access dell.com and get your system's "RAID driver disk" file in the "drivers & downloads" section. The file will create a set of driver disks (or a single diskette) which will load the RAID drivers when the windows XP CD asks for them (in the beginning of installation it says "press F6 for RAID or 3rd party drivers etc."). Oh, and figuring out how to create a diskette on a computer that doesn't come with a diskette drive is also a minor problem ;) Nice job, Dell.

RAID-0 is two drives writing different data at the same time. Basically it tries to speed up your computer by having both drives (two 160gb hard drives) writing different data at the same time. This supposedly speeds up the relatively slow speed of mechanical data seek times versus electrically-stored data on ram (which is thousands of times faster than hard drive seek times...speed of light & all).

It was stupid to call it a RAID since the data on RAID-0 is not redundant. Most upper-scale dells also support RAID-1, which is basically two mirror image drives and IS redundant. You cut your storage space in half but you gain supposedly better redundancy and safety of your data in case one drive should fail.

Oh, and, by the way, to add to Dell's already superior phone-based customer service morale, if you change the setup from a RAID-0 to a RAID-1, Dell will not support it, and if anything happens they will demand you set up the new system as a RAID-0, since that's how it came from the factory. Back up all the data off of the RAID-0 system with CD-burner, external HD, etc. Come to think of it, RAID-1 on dells can also be a pain. Back up frequently to another media.

Dan