HDD OS transfer and RAID????

liquidmonkey

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i have the following setup...

1 TB Western Digital SATA II
1 TB Western Digital SATA II
320 GB Western Digital SATA
200 GB Maxtor SATA

and then 4 x 500 GB externals but i want to sell those

and my main C: drive is the 320gig which i want to change to the brand spanking new 1 TB WD SATA II drive as i think i will get faster speeds. what programs(s) would i need to use to transfer my OS to another HDD?

and do you think i should RAID this setup? never done that before and know nothing about RAID. is it good? faster? what does it do? (don't worry, i'll google RAID a bit later, just heading out).


what would u experts do with a set up like this?
 
I'm running in a RAID 1 config, which basically means I have two hard drives, and when one hard drive is being written to, the other gets written to also, creating a mirror image. If one drive ever failed, I'd be safe, with one drive still up.
This actually happened a week ago.

I was running 2x 320GB drives and one of them failed. Since I couldn't find an exact duplicate of the drive I was running, I opted for 2x 500GB's instead.

I thought the copying process would be intensive, but it wasn't.

I downloaded a free program called 'Seagate Diskwizard'. I have no reasons to think it wouldn't work with other makes of drive also, but I'm not sure:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

It made the copying process as easy as can be, and copied over the 320GB bootable drive, to the 500GB drive, making that bootable too. Everything was mirrored over.
The difference was, I had more space on the two partitions I had created.
 
I'm running in a RAID 1 config, which basically means I have two hard drives, and when one hard drive is being written to, the other gets written to also, creating a mirror image. If one drive ever failed, I'd be safe, with one drive still up.
This actually happened a week ago.

I was running 2x 320GB drives and one of them failed. Since I couldn't find an exact duplicate of the drive I was running, I opted for 2x 500GB's instead.

I thought the copying process would be intensive, but it wasn't.

I downloaded a free program called 'Seagate Diskwizard'. I have no reasons to think it wouldn't work with other makes of drive also, but I'm not sure:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

It made the copying process as easy as can be, and copied over the 320GB bootable drive, to the 500GB drive, making that bootable too. Everything was mirrored over.
The difference was, I had more space on the two partitions I had created.

the faster configuration is to have the drives in RAID 0, but if one of the two drives fails you're proper fugghhhed IIRC, the redundancy of RAID 1 is probably the way to go, especially since you have tons of drive space as it is...
 
thanks for that. great RAID info!!!
looks like i won't be using a RAID setup as i already do my own regular backups via a synchronization tool that i find very useful :)

now as far as ghosting my drive, i'm wondering...

1) does each drive need to be exactly the same size? the only thing i want to 'ghost' is the OS and all installed programs / games etc.

2) norton ghost is the only one i know, are there others? recommendations?

3) since i'm using a 1TB drive for my 'c' drive, should i make 2 partitions, 1 for the ghosted OS and one for the other files. my reasoning would be that if the main OS partition goes for a sh&t, then i can still access the other files on the other partition. or is that thinking wrong? are there special types of partitions i should make to ensure best useability / quality?

thanks...
 
If you use the program I specified, it should work the way you want it fine.
It'll be an exact duplicate of that drive (and you can create partitions with it too), but bigger.

All you'll need to do is put both drives in at once. It'll even format the blank one for you.

I do tend to make an OS partition, yes, but it has to be a good size. Not just how much the OS uses, as its used for all kinds of other information.

I use the C drive to store my OS, drivers, motherboard programs, etc.
 
ended up using seagate discwizard and two weeks on --- everything is working great!!!

thanks for the advice!
 
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