RAID 0 question..

[farkinell]

Would I be able to take a drive image of my current HD, format it, then setup a RAID 0 by buying another identical drive, and use the image to put all my stuff onto the new RAID array? I really dont want to go through the hassle of reinstalling windows, all my programs, games, music etc

Im using a single Samsung SP2504C at the moment and was wondering how much of a performance increase would I see by getting the other drive, (i.e slight, noticable, large)

Thanks for your help.

 

[krazyIvan]

Where would you store the image of your current drive? Do you have a tape back-up big enough? If you were going to save files to CD then you might as well just re-format.
As for the speed, I am doing RAID 0 and personally think it makes my system a little (very little) faster, but that is mainly when first booting-up. I don’t think I would spend the money on two smaller drives again; I would just buy one larger/faster drive.

 

[vic20]

Yes, you normally can if you have more than one SATA controller on your board and you have a spare IDE drive

1) You keep your HD plugged into one of the non-RAID SATA ports.
2) Enable the RAID on the other ports in the BIOS.
3) Boot into you OS and install the driver for the RAID controller.
4) Reboot. Run a chkdsk, reboot, degrag, shut down.
5) Ghost drive from orginal SATA to spare drive. (My have to use -noide switch on GHOST
6) Connect both SATA drives to SATA RAID ports.
7) Boot into RAID BIOS on the controller, create your RAID 0 Stripe. (You may have to initialize it after, depending on controller) Reboot
NOTE: Step 7 WILL ERASE ALL DATA on your original drive! Make sure your spare is a good drive
8) GHOST from spare to your new stripe (again, may have to use -noide switch)
9) Shut down, disconnect spare, boot up
10) Reboot one more time, after Windows has installed the new drives in Device manager. DONE

Now, if you only have one controller on your board for SATA OR RAID, you will have different steps.

1) GHOST to spare IDE drive with -noide switch (chkdsk and defrag first).
2) Disconnect SATA drive.
3) Change SATA to RAID in BIOS.
4) Boot from IDE spare and install SATA RAID drivers.
5) Boot up and shut down to make sure RAID drive is installed.
6) Goto to previous instructions, step 6

EDIT: Hard drives are cheap and RAID 0 will give a huge boost when booting, transferring large/lots of files, recording video and most importantly - loading games

 

[farkinell]

Very helpful, much appreciated

 

[vic20]

No problem Glad to help.

Needed to come up with a way to switch single drive machines to RAID 1 at work without too much down time for our clients.

Worked for me every time so far Good luck