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PCI IDE / SATA raid controllers

K

Kako

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 15, 2001
Messages
371
I have an older PIII pc that has been running the same xp installation without needing to reinstall for several years now. I am getting kind of nervous that the hard drive might give out on me and I will need to have to go through the horrors of losing years of software installation and tweaking to the way I like. I'm thinking about buying an identical ide hard drive and a pci raid card and running the drives mirrored. Doing some searching, I noticed a large number of fairly affordable (sub 20$, some even less than 15) pci cards that not only are ide, but offer other functionality such as sata ports with some even offering e-sata.

From users' experiences, how important is the quality of these 'cheaper' controller cards and would anyone not recommend them? Do I risk losing everything by not buying quality? Are these all in one cards which seem attractive to users with older pc's not all they claim to be? If anyone has personal experience with a similar product to what I'm looking for, please let me know. Any input will be appreciated. Thanks.
 
The cheaper cards offer software raid. Which can sometimes be a pain to get working with XP.
And you would most likely need to reinstall, using the new raid drivers during installation.
And creating a mirrored array (Raid-1) requires a format of the drives.
You may be able to create the array and then restore an image of your existing drive to the array, but again, it won't have the appropriate raid drivers and probably won't boot.

How much space (GB) is used on your main system partition?
Because if I were you, I'd use software like Acronis True Image to create a backup image of your system partition and copy it to another drive, or burn the split-up image files to DVD's, etc. maybe online storage if needed?

Then if your drive ever goes bad, you put a new one in and put in the free Acronis Bootable CD, and follow the prompts to copy the image to your drive. It will boot up just like it was previously.
 
You may be better off looking online for a freeware prog that will let you clone your disk parition to another disk. Because your new HDD would most likely be larger, you just copy the partition itself over. This way you have a hard copy of the drive incase it fails. You can update and reimage it every few months if you want. Then you can remove the drive and put it somewhere safe.
 
If ^that^ is the way you wanna go, I highly recommend the freeware program DriveImage XML
I've used it many times for that exact purpose.

That would probably be the best way to go.
But if you don't want to have to have a dedicated hard drive right now to serve as your system backup, AND you have a second drive/device for data storage like a separate hard drive, external drive, NAS unit, or fileserver, then I would just create an Image of your drive (Can also use DriveImage XML for this) and put the image files on your storage drive for safe-keeping.

But if you are already prepared to buy a new hard drive to act as a backup... the quickest way and most hassle-free way to have a backup that you can quickly swap out in case your main drive goes bad, would be to use DriveImage XML to make an exact copy of your drive to the new drive (doesn't even need to be the same size as the old drive).

A mirrored raid array like you are wanting will cost more time and money than it's worth... to most.

just my 2 cents.
 
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