Setting up 2 hard drives

D

dye4metal

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 24, 2005
Messages
132
well i have a WD80gb right now and im buying a WD160gb they are both satas and im jw can i raid them and get more memory and if i cant, how would i be able to copy all the information from my 80 to the 160
 
NV RAID supports 4 SATA II ports (SATA1-4). Transfer rate is up to 300MB/s.
• NV RAID (Software)
- Supports up to 4 SATA plus 2 ATA 133 Hard drives
- RAID 0 or 1, 0+1, JBOD is supported
- RAID function work w/ ATA 133 + SATA H/D or 2 SATA H/D

specs on my board for raid
 
I don't think you want RAID. In order to create a RAID with those disks they would both have to be blank. Also, your motherboard probably doesn't support making a RAID with dissimilar disks. Is there any reason you want to do RAID specifically? If you just want to increase the amount a storage on your system I would recommend simply adding it as a second drive and not bothering with creating a RAID.
 
I believe that Gparted (there is a live CD) can copy whole partitions and extend NTFS partitions as well. This would allow you to copy the complete 80GB disk to your new one and then extend that partition to cover the complete new disk.
 
i just want more memory. how would i do that. just hookup the harddrive and set it up?
 
Just install it then leave it. RAID will not magically get you more storage, it either provides redundancy or speed increase.
 
No sort of RAID I'm aware of allows mixed-size disks without treating all drives in the array as the size of the smallest disk. Skip RAID, use as separate drive as suggested.
 
dye4metal,
you may be thinking of what's known as JBOD (just bunch of disks) RAID, which just adds multiple drives together but the OS treats it as one disk. for example: say you had a 40GB, an 80GB, and 2 120GB disks, you just want to store movies on them, but don't want to have a ton of separate drive letters cluttering up. JBOD will take all four drives and combine them to make one 360GB disk for the OS. It's convenient, but there is no fault tollerance, the speed will only be as slow as the slowest drive pretty much, and if one drive dies, you can kiss the info on the others goodbye too.
 
Firstly, I don't recommend it!
Secondly, if you really, really want to, you have to make sure the RAID function on your SATA controller is activated in the BIOS.
Thirdly, once in windows, WinXP will probably install the NV RAID drivers; then you will reboot; after reboot you may be able to use the nvidia MediaShield program - you may have to reinstall it from your motherboard driver disk. MediaShield is a utility that lets you set up RAID arrays inside windows, and do a lot of other things.
Not all motherboards support the mediashield program inside windows though, and if you want to set up a RAID array, you'll have to do it from the NV RAID bios when you turn the computer on. If you do it this way, you will destroy any data on the HD when you initialize the RAID array.
If you want to explore and learn, go right ahead, we are born to be [H]ard here, but make sure that you back up the stuff on the HD's you want to RAID, and don't blame anybody but yourself if you end up hosing your system. :D Good luck!
 
You're talking about the WD160GB, right?
If so, yes. You just set the HD jumper to Master, and connect it to any free SATA port.
Windows will automatically recognize it.
You will likely have to set up a new partition on it through the Disk Manager, and format it.
That's very basic stuff, so not to worry, and you can easily find help through the regular Windows Help and Support option on your Start menu.
Good luck. :)
 
so wait. i have a WD80gb sata and i now have a WD160 too. i just want to combine the 2
 
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