Raid 0, opnions wanted.

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philbar71

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Ok so i am going to be getting rid of my 2 current hdd's one 80gb and 160gb in place of (possibly) 2 of these

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

and going raid 0. so i was wondering can i get away with not reinstalling vista and just copying my current 80gb hdd's stuff (including vista install) over to the raid instilation? or is a reinstall needed?

aslo is raid 0 a good option? i want it mainly because of the speed boost. any body got any other recomendations?
 
Ehh you can always try, you're gonna need a problem to clone the contents i think, most system files are unaccessible without a third party program aren't they?

as for RAID, go for it! make sure you backup your files tho.
 
^ you mean program ;) right?

well i would be backing up every thing i have to DVD's and the 160gb hdd. and if i set up the raid array and hooked my 80gb hdd (vista is on this) and boot off of it and copy and paste every thing to the raided 320gb hdd's and try to boot off will this work. that's basically what i'm asking. i dont really want to reinstall. it's a pain.
 
A reinstall will most likely be needed. RAID is set in the BIOS and the drives have to use different drivers than the original SATA.
 
I would try to ghost your current os drive. Then go into windows and copy the ghost to the raid array after it has been setup. Make sure and set it up via the raid utility after bios and not in windows. Then switch boot priority in bios to boot off the array and pull the other drive.
 
I use RAID-0 on my Raptors and the speed boost is nice, but I don't know if I could say it's worth the cost of another drive. Unless you are going RAID-5 where you have some redundancy as well. As far as copying your data, it won't work. You are going to have to do a clean install as the data is spanned across both drives and Windows needs the drivers to accomplish this. Pretty sure you will just get BSODs and crashes if you ghost the current drive to the RAID array. As already suggested, use the onboard RAID controller instead of any software RAID solutions.
 
hmm, i guess i could re install. i think my mobo has hardware raid support. and raid 5 would be nice but i dont want 2 drives, just 2.

so cloning the 80GB hdd to the raid array will not work? is this correct?
 
Again to my knowledge this should work just fine. Set up raid0 array with your current drive as the primary. Once it is set up via the raid utility you should see it in windows. You may or may not need to install windows drivers to use the array. Then ghost from your old drive to the new array. Change the primary boot drive in bios and boot using the array. If any drivers are needed for windows to use the array you would have installed them prior to the ghosting.

Worst case if you cannot get it to work you did not waste much time. You have to set the array up anyways. The only time wasted is ghosting the drive. If it does not work then install a fresh copy of vista on the array. If it does work think of the time you would save.

Here is a nice little walk through of someone who has done it with some success.
 
^ hmm, thanks for the link.

according to that person they got it to work.

last time i checked vista does not need drivers for raid (not entirley sure about this, but google will know)

anybody know of a good ghosting program? preferably free.
 
Vista does require drivers, every piece of hardware has some sort of driver so the OS can interface with it, it is just that vista has a wide array of default drivers for SATA/Raid controllers...
 
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