SATA drives and RAID 0

[kawipoo]

I have a motheboard which allows RAID 0 control for a couple of SATA drives. I am currently using the two IDE hard drives.
I would like to purchase two SATA drives using RAID 1 and be able to transfer the data from the two IDE drives over to the SATA drives. My question is can this be done or do I have to reinstall everything to the SATA drives? I know that with stripping my data is vulnerable. Can I use disk image 7 to backup my RAID hard drives on my exisiting IDE drives?
In short can someone help me in the best way of moving data over to SATA drives and then backing up the data later.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by kawipoo on 03/28/04 08:03 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[arkus]

By "currently using IDE drives" I assume you mean PATA drives... Any decent mobo should allow you to have both PATA and SATA hard drives connected at the same time, so you should be able to copy all your files (but don't do system files and the like) across to the new SATA drives. I'd install the OS to the new SATA drives and then connect your old PATA drives afterwards to copy everything across.

RAID 1 isn't striping, it's mirroring, so there's no need to do another backup (unless you're really paranoid).

I suggest you re-read the FAQ and the ones at <A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com</A>

<A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=2765&st=0#entry21597" target="_new">My Rigs</A>

 

[jim552]

The short answer is "yes" you can copy data from your IDE drives to the the SATA drives. (Calling them IDE drives is correct, however; many people prefer to use the newer terminology of PATA for consistency.)

1) Enable your SATA controllers in your motherboard BIOS.
2) Install the drivers for your SATA controllers.
3) Make sure the drives are seen under disk management, and also make sure you can see the drives under a DOS, command line boot.
4) Clone from the IDE drives to the SATA drives. (After this is done DO NOT boot into Windows while the IDE drives are in the system. If you do Windows can confuse the drive letters later on.)
5) Remove the IDE drives, and boot from the SATA drives.
6) Make sure your drive identifiers are what you expect, need, them to be. Run a few diagnostic tests, even defrag or scandisk is okay.
7) Setup to mirror to the second SATA drive, and then make sure the array gets rebuilt.
8) After that you can replace the IDE drives back into the system, and use them for data.


Now all of that being said.
These are JUST "General Steps". There are a lot of nuances that may exist but have been left out.

Some SATA controllers have two modes of operation. (Maybe more, but I have only seen two so far.)

"IDE Mode" where they look/act more like standard IDE drives.

"RAID Mode" where they look/act like RAID controllers.

On some controllers you will need to use a combination of modes. Sometimes "IDE Mode" must be used to make the intial clone of the IDE drive, because a DOS boot won't see the drives in "RAID Mode". After that cloning process has occured the controller gets set back to "RAID Mode".

Some controllers, maybe all, have different drivers for different modes.

You will need to read all of your literature thoughly first.

I have always used Ghost for the cloning process.

There is no need need for a complete OS installation, since the only thing the OS needs is the new driver.

 

[kawipoo]

I assume this works for raid 0 which uses strips instead of mirroring.

 

[jim552]

From what I understand the procedure will generally work, but it will depend on your controller.

For me personally, I have NO EXPERIENCE in using RAID 0 for boot and systems partitions. I prefer to keep things as "safe" as possible, and as such only use mirroring for boot and system partitions.

On data partitions I have used RAID 0 before, but at that point I just copy the data over from the other drives VIA the OS or by restoring from backup.

So the issue of transfering a bootable OS to a bootable RAID 0 system doesn't ever come up for me.