Hard drive(s) setup

[FirestormX]

I tried posting this thread in the general hardware section but nobody seemed to know. So I'm hoping some of you guys could help me out.

I have a few questions reguarding hard drives:

My new motherboard will have onboard eide/sata raid and I was looking into my options. Currently I have Dual 120GB 7200RPM 8MB Western Digital EIDE Caviars which is what I plan on starting with. However, neither came with a ATA Ultra card that I would need if they were above 137GB. If I raid them (0 i think) to form a 240, will my onboard raid controller take care of the barrier or will windows still start rewriting data once it reaches 137GB? Also, my friend told me Raid does not allow multiple partitions...I don't see how this could be true, is it? How would you guys as Pros recommend I partition them (if you can partition raid)? Would it be a smart or a dumb thing to have a seperate partition for program installs, if windows crashed on its seperate partition would they still run or have errors because the new install of windows wouldnt have the registry entries? And finally, at some point down the line I'll probably upgrade to SATA once they get faster/cheaper, would I just be able to copy everything (including windows/appz installs) off my Dual 120s onto the new SATA drive(s) and run them as primary? Or would there be some kind of error caused by doing this. I dont partiuarly enjoy reinstalling everything so I thought that might work...

Lot of questions actually...but any answers would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[Mday]

this is not the place for this, please post in general hardware or something similar.

but since you're new, i'll answer you.

the formation of a 240GB raid array can cause problems. windows does not support a single partition that size out of the box, that is, you'll have to do some extra things after installation of windows to have everything working and recognized (formatted ,etc). what will happen after creation of the array is that the array acts as one HDD, outside of the controller. this means you can partition, etc. as if it was one large drive. the problem is, in raid 0, you have a higher probability of error. i would recommend not using RAID. or if you do go that route, have a 3rd HDD as a means of storing data that is critical to you not ripping out your hair if something goes wrong.

if you intend on going to SATA, i recommend reinstalling everything, instead of restoring. this can cause problems since it requires a new set of drivers and hardware.

now for partitioning. I partition my drives just for space saving and file organization. windows and productivity apps goes into my C partition. games and large programs (such as ms streets & trips) go into my d partition. E+ partitions are for data. i have 9 partitions (3 on each of 3 120 GB HDDs).

now for something that few ppl do. i keep the 3rd partition my backup partition. that is, i keep the last partition on any individual drive my backup partition. why? if i were to accidentally overwrite parts of my hdd through some stupidity, the END of the hdd (being the last partition) will be less likely to be written over. this has saved my ass often =)

 

[pyrojunkie]

The 137GB limitation is not a Windows limitation. Its a controller limitation that can be fixed most times by a simple flash of the card.

There is a Windows limitation for partition sizes but for XP its much higher than 240GB. I currently use 4 120GB on 2 seperate raid cards for a single partition of 480GB(take a little off on the conversion). The tradeoff to the extra speed is the higher chance of failure, but don't be too scared of it. I use external drives and network storage to backup data. Though the chance is higher in RAID 0 for you to lose data, you can lose data just as easily if it were on one drive that fails. The key is always backup.

I don't use multiple partition personally because I don't believe its good to leave any remanence of an old installation. You might consider doing a fresh install of the OS and all your apps/games, then Ghost image it so you can restore to that point whenever you want.

 

[rjain]

with 4-drive RAID0, your chances of losing the data in any one file or partition are 4x as much as if the whole file or partition were on a single drive.