The Given: I know what RAID is, and I know I want a mirror setup with RAID 1 The Question: How do I put two disks into a RAID array? The Second Question: Can I use my current 80GB HDD with data on it and put in another 80GB and put them into a RAID 1 array? Thanks! <(-.-)>
Question 1) What motherboard do you have, does it support RAID? if yes, there will be an option after the "hit F2 to enter bios" screen saying sommit like "hit alt and F6 to enter FASTRAID Setup" or something similar -- if this is the case, you put two disks into your box (master/slave if IDE(same chain) or set both SATA disks to master(ports1/2 or 3/4)) then go into the raid setup and you should be able to select the type of raid you wish (0,1,5,10 etc -- what ever the board supports) it will then build the raid array and you should be good to go question 2) no, all data on all disks will be lost when you put them into a raid array.
how to put two disks into a raid array depends on how you have set up your raid array. hardware or software have different methods of configuration. your motherboard may support it, try checking the manual. it is important to remember that you do not put both drives on the same chain. if your array is a mirror, with two hard drives, and you have a cdrom in your machine (or a dvdrom/rw/whatever), your best option is to use ide0-master as a hdd, ide0-slave as a cdrom, then ide1-master as a hdd. Code: ide0 +-Master = hdd +-slave = cdrom ide1 +-Master = hdd +-slave = nothing separating the hard drives onto separate controllers will increase performance somewhat as both controllers can be operating simultaneously, although with mirroring you wont see any improvement in performance (and will most likely see a reduced write speed). it also increases the survival rate of your drives (i.e. if your mobo explodes, there is less chance of it taking out both chains at the same time, if one dies you can restore from the other, the essence of raid mirrors) you might also want to check your bios to see if you can enable a "pci busmaster". most bios's (even in this day and age) offer ISA busmastering and PCI busmastering, a throwback to the olden days when ide drives used to hang off the ISA bus. if you do have PCI busmastering available, turn it on, it will improve the performance of your drives. you can save the data on your existing partitions, but if this is your first array, you are much better off backing up and wiping the drive to start afresh with the array, it is complex and exceedingly error prone to mirror an existing partition. as for the "press this button, then this one" setup methods, it would help a lot to know what kind of array you are creating. is it hardware based? do you have a raid card? are you creating it using software? for windows or linux or mac? whilst someone on here could undoubtedly give you exact instructions, i found it much more fun to figure out for myself, and although i didn't get it right first time (nobody ever does), you will quickly learn how to set up and use your array, something that may prove to be important one day when it all goes horribly wrong
My mobo supports raid 1 and 0, I wish for a raid 1 array. So it's hardware based, but I do use Windows or Linux w/ dual booting. Using both IDE0 and 1 is easy enough, I have 1 DVD drive to go with the HDDs, I just didn't know you could have a HDD and DVD together.. but I'd probably get two SATA drives anyway if I had a choice, to augment my current IDE drive. I'll look for buttons and get back to edit this post on what I see. Lastly, if I make this array, would it be possible to get all my Windows/Linux system files onto the array? EDIT: I went into the BIOS and saw it has a RAID setup, but only for SATA, so that's fine, but it says "RAID [DISABLED]" "SATA 1 RAID [DISABLED]" "SATA 1 RAID [DISABLED]" All the [DISABLED] can be switched to enabled but that's it.. I don't know what kind of RAID it's really talking about, 0 or 1... but I'm thinking reading the manual could clear things up.. I'll edit again once I've read it EDIT again, I found how to setup RAID, the driver CD for the mobo has files to save to a floppy.. I have no floppy and it says it has to be setup while installing Windows, so that sucks... I guess an external HDD to back-up data to every once in awhile is the best option
yeah, windows doesnt handle such things well, raid is still a rarity in the desktop system. if all you want is backup, raid might not be the best answer anyways. raid is all well and good but a raid mirror wont help if someone picks up your pc and legs it how much data are you backing up? i have a dvd burner (around £20-£30 nowadays) for most stuff, just burn off a dvd, then once every couple of months i pull the side off my case, add an ide hdd and copy everything over (but then, i have to clean my machine once every couple of months, i live in dust hell!).
I've only got 80GB, plus the 4GB laptop, but the safety of data is good since power outages are frequenty, tinkering is frequent, and random drive failure is always there.. maybe that all could fit to DVD I suppose.. the laptop's data could all fit on my flash drive, rofl
Just one thing to remember, RAID isn't backup... And RAID 1 doesn't do anything against data corruption...
