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raid type question

Cold Dark Shadow

Cold Dark Shadow

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 24, 2003
Messages
12,720
OK say i wasnt to add my HDDs to my comp but i can only have 2 connected, can i throw one of those PCI RAID cards in and hook up other drives and they would be detected on my comp or do i have to format everything to make it one big drive?

IE:
I have
Drive C and E

Throw one of those cards in and a couple HDDs and get like
drive F and G
 
I am going to cavalierly presume that you are running Windows XP Professional. If this is incorrect, please let me know.

Physically install your new add-in card, and get the driver for the card installed. You will need to restart if you already have the drives attached so Windows can initialize them.

Connect the drives if you haven't already done so, reboot the machine and verify that the card sees the new drives. You won't get very far in Windows if the card BIOS doesn't see the drives :p

Once you get back to desktop, 'Start\Run\diskmgmt.msc' If a wizard pops up, proceed through it, making sure that all new disks are selected for initialization, but NONE are selected for conversion. After the wizard gets done, you will see the new disks in the upper list, and in the lower list, you will see a logarithmically scaled graphic of your hard drive space.

The only way to span a file system across multiple disks (and make it show up as one big drive in Windows) is to convert the disks to dynamic (right click each disk icon and select convert to dynamic disk), then create a spanned volume using all of the free space on all of the new disks. If the drives are all the same size, you can create a striped volume out of all of the new disks and obtain all of the space in one drive letter that way as well. BEWARE: If you use either of these methods to obtain one file system and drive letter across multiple physical disks, if any ONE of those phyiscal disks fails, ALL of the data on that volume will be inaccessible. I highly recommend that you educate yourself on the pitfalls of dynamic disks and using a single file system spanned or striped across multiple physical disks without fault tolerance. There is an extremely high risk of data loss with this approach. If irreplaceable data will be stored on these new drives, you will also need to devise a removable media backup plan. You have been warned. Any other questions, please post specifics. BTW, did Kyle make the chain between you and the desk longer? You can reach all the way from FS/T to DSS now :p
 
Yea im running XP Pro

I dont want to make 1 big drive, least not yet, i just want to add more drives and wasnt sure if i could by just popin the card in and the drive without having to do to much
 
Then the answer is YES. just do what DougLite said above and it'll be fine ..
 
Pretty easy then. Disk Management will allow you to partition and format as desired. Just right click the space on the new drives, create a partition, then pick a drive letter and format using the subsequent wizard. Not too bad. If you do a quick format, you can have your new giggage online in a matter of moments.
 
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