Putting in an extra hard drive

[jonessoda]

My mobo supports JBOD, and I was looking at expanding my storage space a little. So, I have a question. If I wanted to put in an extra HDD or two, then put them with my current HDD in a JBOD array, will I need to format and reinstall Windows? Or will it simply add on to my current drive?

Specifics: Currently running Seagate 300gb SATA 3.5" 7200RPM drive. Would be adding one or two similar drives (SATA, Seagate).

Now, if I have to do a clean reinstall (and I might anyway, just to get it cleaned up a little, or when the commercial version of Vista comes out), could I do a Boot-and-nuke on my current HDD and still have it work to get a regular format and reinstall? Or, does Boot-and-nuke pretty much trash a HDD permanently (I know it completely destroys the data)?

 

[Zepper]

B&N just affects the data, not the drive itself. A jbod array has to be formatted as an array. So generally you will want to do a backup of your current drive, wipe all the drives you want to inslude in the array, then format all of them together in the array. Finally you will restore your backup to the new JBOD array. Some RAID management might be able to integrate the current drive with the data in place, but I'd still want a backup JIC something goes wrong.

.bh.

 

[jonessoda]

Doable. I have an external drive that will hold everything. No need to do an image, I suppose, just copy important docs and files, yeah?

 

[stu1811]

Disable the raid controller and use the ports. I have 2 WDs attached the nvraid on my mobo. I have not setup any type of raid. Complete rig in sig.

 

[jonessoda]

I'd kind of prefer to have it act as a single drive. I already have a lot of drives listed (A: for floppy, C: for HDD, D: and E: for my 2 DVD drives, F: for thumbdrives, and G:-J: for my card reader which, for some reasons, always shows up as multiple drives, even though I set it up so it shouldn't. C'est la vie) and I'd prefer not to let it get even more cluttered.