Raid 1config

[CRD67]

I'm purchasing a Dell XPS 8300 with 2 750MB HDs configured as a raid 0 system. I would rather have the safety of a raid 1 system. Can I partition each drive with the same patitions on each drive and configure the system as raid 1.

crd67

 

[tomatthe]

You would lose all data on the system to switch from Raid 0 to Raid 1.

If you wanted to do this, assuming the machine isn't using software raid and that the controller supports Raid 1, you would need to access the raid controller which you generally will see a message on boot saying Press Ctrl + I or something similar to access the raid bios. Once there you would need to delete the Raid 0 set, and recreate the set as Raid 1. You would then only see the raid set as one drive, and just need to partition it how you wanted. You would then need to fully reinstall Windows, apps, etc which may be quite complicated depending on what type of media Dell gives you if any at all other then an on-board recovery type thing.

I did a quick google, and it is very odd to me that Dell sells these machines with Raid 0 as an option, but not Raid 1. It's very possible whatever hardware they are using does not support Raid 1 at all, and I would suggest verifying with them that it would work rather then going by anything I mentioned above. I don't quite get the thinking behind that, and it seems like it would cause a lot of issues for them.

I would suggest ordering the machine with a single drive, and adding another drive yourself which you could use for backing up data, or definitely verifying with them about recovery media, and that the machine will run with a Raid 1 config before ordering.

 

[CRD67]

Best answer selected by CRD67.