advice needed: dual boot snow leopard, win7 with RAID

[axroh]

Hi Folks,

 

Have been spending the last several days reading up on hackintosh related stuff here and Tonymac's blog. Very cool.

 

I want to setup a stable, fast system for my wife. Currently she has a mac book pro 2.2 GHz - and the display went kaput on her. She's a graphic designer and so uses adobe stuff (indesign, photoshop, illustrator etc). So to give her flexibility, I also want to set up a win7 complete install on another partition or drive. I'm also tired of making backups, so was just thinking of going RAID (mirroring) all the way. I'm thinking I want to follow tonymac's guide perfectly, so I will buy a Gigabyte P55M-UD2 motherboard, core i7, 8 GB of ram or so, some hard drives, etc.

 

Couple of Qs:

1. Would tonymac's setup work with RAID? I believe the motherboard supports it via bios, so would the OS even care?

2. How would you recommend I partition this? I was thinking of a data drive accessible by both os's, but this needs to be mirrored. What FS should I use? And I'd like to mirror both OS's as well. Hmm. 320GB x2 for the OSs, and 1T x2 for the data? Would I be able to do this with that motherboard?

3. She doesn't care about 3d/game performance. Recommendations for a wicked fast 2d centric graphics card? am I going overboard if I order an nvidia 250?

4. what's an ideal case for such a setup? If (2) above works, I need space for 4 drives.

5. Should I consider another motherboard? I think one of the Gigabyte boards supports usb 3.0 and sata 6gb/s (I think this one is 3gb/s).

6. Finally, (phew!), is everything working in tonymac's setup? sleep, ethernet controller, usb, audio etc?

 

Sorry for all the Qs, I'm still wrapping my head around all this stuff. TIA.

[axroh]

^bump. Wow. maybe my questions are too newb. Hmm, can you guys help out with answering maybe some of my Qs?

[axroh]

alrite. final bump. or else I'll just wing it and buy the hardware and try it on my own