Setting up 3 hard drives

Cmar-Ireland

Hi all,

I bought an XPS 720 last week, and it came with 1x 500gb 7.2k hard drive and 2x 160gb 10k raptors. So far I've just been messing around on it but before I start to set it up properly and retire my old pc, I want to know if I can set the the new system up like this? I would like to have the OS and critical system functions on the raptors in striped mode, so having 320gb of fast storage. And for all the other stuff, games music etc etc to use the 500gb drive.

How do I go about doing this?

Gadgetman496

From what you are saying you have three drives installed but no raid?

You would need to reinstall the OS & choose the F6 option during the install process to configure the raid set using the two 160GB drives, you will need the raid drivers for you Mobo too & if the OS is not Vista you will need the raid drivers on a floppy disk (along with a floppy drive in your system)

If the OS is Vista you can load the raid drivers from a CD\DVD or other types of storage.

Once installed you can use the 3rd drive (500GB) for the extra storage space.

Cmar-Ireland

Gadgetman,
There are three drives in the pc and it's running vista. It looks like the system is factory set to use the 500gb drive as storage and os. The OS is on a seperate partition so I have c & d drives out of the one. The raptors don't show up at all under my computer at the moment.

So if I do a reinstall of vista, I can select what drive it will install to and configure the way they can be used? What about the Dell recovery partition? Will this also install where I want it?

Khannie

I'm just going to urge caution here.....

The raptors are very well built....BUT....raid 0 is a recipe for disaster. Raid 1 would give similar read performance (which is what you're after) and provides redundancy in case one of the drives goes tits up. You'd only have 160G of fast storage though (this is enough for most things you want fast storage for).

Gadgetman496

Cmar-Ireland wrote: »

Gadgetman,
There are three drives in the pc and it's running vista. It looks like the system is factory set to use the 500gb drive as storage and os. The OS is on a seperate partition so I have c & d drives out of the one. The raptors don't show up at all under my computer at the moment.

So if I do a reinstall of vista, I can select what drive it will install to and configure the way they can be used? What about the Dell recovery partition? Will this also install where I want it?

I'm not 100% sure if the recovery partition will give you the option to choose the install location or force you to install to the default it was originally installed on. Someone with more experience in that Dept might be able to clarify that?

Cmar-Ireland

Ok so if I mirror the drives instead of striping it will provide more security, but half the storage space? Shouldn't be a problem I suppose, as long as 160 is enough for the OS and office programs (word excel adobe etc).

I think a call to the XPS hotline is in order. I don't trust my skills enough to pull this off...

Gadgetman496

Khannie wrote: »

I'm just going to urge caution here.....

The raptors are very well built....BUT....raid 0 is a recipe for disaster. Raid 1 would give similar read performance (which is what you're after) and provides redundancy in case one of the drives goes tits up. You'd only have 160G of fast storage though (this is enough for most things you want fast storage for).

Khannie,

When you refer to raid 0 & 1 I take it that this translates to 0 = Stripe & 1 = Mirror?

When you say raid 0 is a recipe for disaster, do you mean that if one drive gets upset you will lose everything? whereas in the Mirror setup one of the drives is actually a clone of the other & will take over in the event that the other goes belly up?

Is that why you say raid 0 is a recipe for disaster or do you believe that particular raidset is unstable?

The reason I ask is that I have a Raid 0 setup on two WD 500GB drives on my latest Rig built in June & it appears to be working extremely well, I fully realise that if anything goes wrong the lot is gone but aside from that is there any other reason you dislike this setup?

I'm not by any means well up on the world of raid but am curious as to the advice I suggested to Cmar-Ireland, was I correct in saying that the raidset must be created at the install stage or can a rad be setup after an install has been completed?

Capt'n Midnight

With raid 0 if one drive dies you loose everything starting with the file index, so no file or folder name.

if you have 64KB stripes every file bigger than 64KB will be broken.
If you have NTFS then because of the way windows clusters small files together you will not be able to recover files smaller than 15K by searching at cluster boundaries.

hard drives fail.
the worst batch of quantums I saw had 50% failures almost all around the three year old mark when you'd think they would be at the bottom of the bathtub curve.

PogMoThoin

gadgetman496 wrote: »

If the OS is Vista you can load the raid drivers from a CD\DVD or other types of storage.

Not true, Vista already has raid drivers & will recognise a raid array straight away during install. Just update the driver once installed.

Gadgetman496

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Not true, Vista already has raid drivers & will recognise a raid array straight away during install. Just update the driver once installed.

You must have a special version of Vista PogMoThoin?

I installed Vista Ultimate on a brand new rig this morning & it most definitely asked for the raid drivers & I loaded them from a pen drive? (The rig had no floppy installed)

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Cmar-Ireland

Ok, I did a clean vista install last night with the help of the dell xps helpline.
First I set up the raid as striped, then proceeded with the install. During the install I selected the raid array for the OS and it worked perfectly from there.
Now I have the OS on the raptors in raid 1, and the larger storage drive has a 10gb recovery partition. So now I have about 455gb on the storage, but thats fine for now. There is another free hd position in the case if I ever need more.

Have to say the dell guy was very helpful/knowledgeable.

Cheers!