The Uber computer and RAID

[Ed Correia]

Afternoon all,

I am busy with setting up the ORBX uber computer that I won. Now this question is mainly about RAID setup, of which I have not used before. So at the moment I have 2 hard drives (140 gb each) in a RAID 0 striped configuration giving me 280 gb. Vista 32 is installed. Now my plan is to take my old 240 gb hard drive from my ex-computer and plug it into the next available SATA. My main concern is that I have not deleted any data from my old hard drive yet, and I don't want to. Lets just say its my backup for now. Now not having used RAID before, is the controller going to do something to my old hard drive when connected? Such as delete the data? Or will I end up with another hard drive in Vista with my data still intact? Basically I'm wanting to know what will happen when I connect the hard drive. Will a new RAID setup be presented for me to choose, or can I just leave that hard drive to be seperate from the RAID 0 setup and just be used as a backup hard drive.

I'm happy to leave the 2 original hard drives in their RAID 0 setup. I understand that if one fails, I loose the all data. Thats where my old hard drive would come in, I'll be using it as backup. Another question is RAID 5. Would that be possible with a 240 gb hard drive or would I need 280 gig to cover all of the striped (2 x 140gb) setup?

Thanks

Ed

[Ian Routley]

You should be absolutely fine - although you sometimes have to go to administrstive tools and assign a volume letter to the new drive.

The hard bit has been done for you (setting up RAID)

It should (more-or-less) plug and play.

[Ed Correia]

Thanks Ian.

I was just having a look at the BIOS now and I noticed that SATA 1 & 2 have RAID enabled and SATA 3 has it disabled. So I'll plug her into that one and I should be OK.

Thanks again