Raid

[Disvengeance]

How do i go about setting up raid with my 120 gb wd se with windows xp, and my other 120 gb wd se without anything on it, is this possible?

[Shorty]

It depends alot on what RAID mode you want :)

RAID-0 is two 120gb drives acting as one large hard drive (240gb), with the data spread in equal chunks across the two.

RAID-1 is two drives acting as one but you lose half the drive space as it mirrors everything on drive 1 onto drive 2.

Which mode where you thinking of using ?? Speed or redundancy? :)

[TheLostSwede]

Did you mean setting it up with the existing partition or do you intend to wipe the harddrive? To use them in a raid, you need to delete all partitions, reboot, go into the raid bios, create the array, set the chunksize, reboot, go into fdisk or any 3:rd party software (Partition Magic), create the partitions, reboot, install os.

Make sure to hit F6 when the os setup says "Hit F6 to install any additional device, scsi, raid etc". Load the raiddrivers on the floppy and install the os as usual.

Do you have onboard raid or a pci card?

[Tex]

Disvengeance said
How do i go about setting up raid with my 120 gb wd se with windows xp, and my other 120 gb wd se without anything on it, is this possible?

It sounds as if you expected to be able to do this with your data intact? As in not lose whats on the WD SE now with XP on it? Not possible with raid-0. Just wanted to make that crystal clear so you realize what will happen when you create a raid-0 arrray in the bios.

tex

[Spinner]

Yea, presuming that's what you want to do, create a RAID 0 array without losing the existing data, you can't do it. You may be able to use a disk image program or backup utility of some sort to save an image of you Windows installation and then once the array is set up, you could put it back on to it, but bare in mind RAID arrays have always been a little more fiddly to restore data to than standalone drives setups, but it should be possible.

Either way, for a basic guide to setting up RAID 0, check out the RAID FAQ's thread here at Short-Media, as it contains a basic guide to setting up RAID 0 under Windows 2000 and XP.

Cheers

[Disvengeance]

thanks for ur advice guys, but i posted that at 3am, and after that i figured it out for myself, thanks though

right now im runnin raid1.5

[TheLostSwede]

Is it 3am again?
Never heard of Raid 1.5. Is it a new warp engine? Have i seen to much Voyager lately? Seven of Nine? :hair:

[Tex]

You can't run raid 5 with two disks and raid 5 would cause you to lose data so he is running raid-1. On these toy controllers thats the greatest waste of disk space and cpu cycles possible. Would of been much better to use the second drive as a backup drive. raid-1 on the hpt on a home computer is raiding something for all the wrong reasons with the wrong tool to boot.

Tex

[Disvengeance]

raid 1.5 is the same as raid 1+0 but only uses 2 drives instead of 4

[Tex]

Raid 1 is mirrored. Thats two drives. raid 10 is mirrored arrays of raid-0. Thats 4 drives.

Tex