Full Hard Drive

[azwalkingman]

My daughter has a 250 gb hard drive. She is into graphics design and gaming. She only has 9gb left on her drive and she is very poor at backing up her system. I think it would be best to replace her current drive with 2 larger ones (maybe two TB ones) on a raid setup thus solving the space and backup issue in one operation. My question is, how should i go about doing this? Can I install both large HDs and copy her existing os,data and programs to one and then set up raid? Her board is an Intel Desktop D945GCCR. Thank you, Kevin

 

[MrLinux]

RAID isn't a backup, if your PC crashes and writes garbage to a file (or the MFT) it will happen to both drives; if someone deletes a file (by accident) it will happen to both drives.

 

[azwalkingman]

Thank you for your comment MrLinux. I realize your point, but I said that she's poor at backups so i was looking for the next best alternative. I realize that both drives act as one and that both are corrupted when infected. The greeatest advantage of RAID is that nothing is lost when (not if) a hard drive fails. My question to the community was how best to go about creating a RAID setup. Can I install a bigger hard drive, set up RAID, mirror everything from the existing 250 gb drive to the larger drive and then install the second large drive and go thru the same process? This is the part that I need an answer for. Thanks again, Kevin

 

[MrLinux]

Safest way is to remove the existing drive, install the new, re-install the OS and applications (etc), then when you are happy the machine is running correctly, connect the old drive (either direct or in a USB caddy) and transfer over all the data files (etc) She needs; it's also worth putting the old drive in storage for a few months (just in case something has been missed).

RAID arrays are best created from scratch, trying to migrate from non-RAID to RAID can cause problems.

 

[jsc]

If you are going to use a RAID for this, you need to use RAID 1 (mirroring) and not RAID 0 (striping).

 

[azwalkingman]

Thanks for the advice. Not as simple as i thought, but that does sound like the safest way to go. Thanks again, Kevin