nVidia nForce RAID – to be avoided?
So I rereinstalled. This time I got impatient and installed NWN while Service Pack 2 was downloading. Don’t do this! Installing software during the service pack download confused the installer; this caused errors in the update of some components, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to back out the service pack and try again.
However, the good news is that with a reinstall that does not use nForce RAID, the system is stable like it was before I went to RAID. The moral of the story seems to be “don’t use nForce RAID”. I am instead using the Windows XP Pro RAID (striped) with no problems. Benchmarks suggest that it should give similar performance, although I haven’t tested it yet.
It’s sad to lose two or three days of free time that could be spent gaming or something. It’s not like I wouldn’t have wasted that time anyway, but I didn’t want to spend all this time installing. Anyway, learn from my mistakes, don’t use the nForce onboard RAID. If you ignore my advice and do it anyway, make backups, even if it’s a mirror.
