you dont need a floppy....you can burn it onto a cd or put it on a usb thumb drive

usb flash drives work on anything, i used one to add  drivers for a touchscreen on a win2000 machine
you def dont need a floppy.
the raid drivers are on your mobo website , you dont need xp cd.

Hey guys, got my new comp parts, got everything together, and I'm stuck on installing XP onto a RAID 0 system. It would be easy if i had a disc drive, as the MB's disc has the drivers. It has a utility to copy the RAID drivers onto a disc, but I dont have a disc drive. There must me some way around this? XP asks during installation for the RAID drivers, but it seems it can only take them from a disc drive. Please help, dont want to have to go buy a floppy drive.

I prefer creating a new XP install CD using nLite and "slipstreaming" the drivers in to the install disk.

With nLite you can:
1. Add the service pack(s) to the install before you create you install disk
2. Add any drivers you want
3. Create an "unattended" install - so you just start the install, go watch a movie, come back and it's done; no questions to answer
4. Set options for the way you like your XP configured things like "show file extensions", or "Show hidden files", etc, can be built into you XP install CD

You can get nLite here:
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

It's easy to use, and it's free. The only quirky thing is that I've had trouble getting it to directly burn the install disk. Now I simply tell it to save the install disk image as an ISO when it's done, and then I burn the image with Nero.

You'll need:
1. nLite installed on a working machine with a CD rom burner
2. XP Install CD
3. All service packs and drivers you want to add to the install
4. Some time. It takes a while to copy all the files and to merge service packs and stuff with the existing files.


Cheers,
Amino

Indeed they are...
My favorite set up for the past few years has been one small fast drive (velociraptor, e.g.) for the OS and a two large slower disks in RAID-1 that I use as my "library" - and to which I back up my OS. One of the big advantages with this is that with some RAID motherboards, the first drive works just like a regular IDE drive, so I can install the raid drivers for the "library" after the OS is installed.

Unfortunately, the Intel RAID does not work this way, and you need to have the raid drivers installed if *any* of the drives connected to the controller are in RAID - even if the one you're putting the OS is not part of a RAID. Which has led me to slip-streaming the drivers into the OS install using nLite for XP and vLite for Vista.

Good luck...

Amino

It's a tough call...
I've been reading a lot about SSDs, and I just feel like they're just starting to be viable. One thing I'm worried about is data loss (though I guess I shouldn't be too worried about it when I'm backing up my OS drive to a mirrored RAID); it seems like some of the SSDs dont have the data life expectancy of regular HD's. I still haven't found anything to convince me to make the leap as they're still so expensive and the ones with the best performance (like the Intel) are like twice as much $$. I'm holding off until 2010, just to let the prices come down a little more and for them to get a little more of a proven track record. OTOH, if I weren't saving for my wedding I'd probably buy one now!

I know that's not too helpful, but...
Maybe check around on tomshardware.com, they've got some performance tests and the people on the forums I'm sure have lots of opinions on the subject.

Cheers,
Amino

I have three 74GB Raptors and I find that my 640GB SATA drive has better sustained rates. Approaching 100MB/sec as opposed to mid 60s.