Help me setup RAID! g50

Im sitting here typing form my new g50 a1. im in LOVE. amazing machine
I want to setup raid for faster load times and whatnot and have a pretty good idea using Viscious's guide. I thought for some reason I needed to make a disc or something? Im a little lost. IM also not sure what raid setup to do and if i need to do any partions?

Lastly right now stock as it came from the box, under Computer I bring it up and it shows me 4 Hardrives.
C D F and G. all are 116 g cept for the D which is 106. this normal?

Thanks for any help.

 

they are not hard drives, they are partitions.

 

Does this mean my PC is alrdy setup with raid?

 

No. Your HDD got 2 partition on each. I don't know why is split in 4 but I think they all come like that. I set my A2 in RAID-0 using Vicious guide. Everything went fine. Make sure you got the windows recovery dvd and the drivers CD. You don't need any other CD(DVD). After you set RAID, you'll need to re-install windows (make sure you back up if you have picture/video in there). I highly suggest you following Vicious guide.

EDIT: ''Look at your first post''. All the information are in vicious guide about the raid (Raid-0 and Raid-1). You don't need to create a partition after setting in raid. Vicious suggest recovering Windows and create 2 partitions (option 3) but it's up to you. He also explain why he suggest doing 2 partitions ( one for game/OS/others Installs and the other one for pictures/videos/music/etc).

PS:Sorry if my english is bad... it's late -_-

 

Asus' standard formatting for HDDs in all of their notebooks is to split the drive into double partitions, one for OS and one for date. This is how they arrive at the plant, probably, and there isn't a separate box that they pull the G50 series from so you end up with two HDDs with 2 partitions already on each of them.

 

I just setup my G50 in a RAID 0 configuration, yesterday.
WARNING: This requires reinstalling your operating system.

First you have to go into your BIOS and change the hard drive properties to Raid. You can get to the BIOS by hitting F2 during bootup while the Republic of Gamers logo is shown.

Once inside the BIOS, it's I believe the third or forth tab over that will give you hard drive options. If I had it with me right now, I would give you an exact name, but I do not. You should not have any trouble finding it, though, if you just browse through the settings. Save and exit the bios.

Once you have enable Raid mode, Windows Vista should BSOD if you try to open it now. So you must reinstall Vista in order to get it to work.

Vista includes the required storage drivers to enable the raid configuration, so you will not have to worry about hunting down the mandatory drivers. All you need to do is insert your vista disk (or the recovery disc that is included with the laptop), and follow the installation procedure. When it comes to the choice about where to install it, click on the advance options at the bottom. Delete all partitions (including recovery partition) until you only have two drives showing. Now choose to install on drive 0 or the first drive in the setup utility. This should get everything installed.

After installing, you can use the driver disc to install all of your drivers. I noticed that ASUS does not have any drivers listed under Vista x64 on their site for the G50 which is what you will have if you use the cd that came with it, so you need to use the included driver disc at the moment to install everything. I recommend only installing the drivers and not installing all the bundled crap on the disc, except for maybe splendid or something else you might like. This should get you up and going.

Once inside Vista, I recommend going into Device Manger (start->"devmgmt.msc"). Expand the "Disk Drives" option. Open the properties for both drives, navigate to the policies tab and click to check "Enable advance performance". Make sure you repeat the same for the other drive.

In addition to this, you may also consider using vlite (vlite.com) to integrate hotfixes, remove components, and perform a few tweaks to your installation dvd so it will run faster (not that it runs slow by no means). Just make sure you don't remove your storage drivers with vlite or you will have to start over. Even the intel matrix storage drivers from intel's site do not enable detection of your drives if you delete these for some reason. If you didn't understand this paragraph, that's alright. If you do the things I mentioned prior, you will be fine.