More Raid Question

[jamestobin]

Hi,

I have 2 machines at the moment, each machine with one drive. I'm not looking at adding an additional drive to each machine to permit Raid 1. The first has a A3475SCSI SCSI controller and an NVIDIA NForce MCP2 IDE Controller, Primary and Secondary IDE Channel. Can any body confirm whether this will allow me to install a second hard drive (though both drives in this machine will need to be the same size)?

Will the mirroring happen automatically or will I need to install additional software?

Thanks,
James

[bubba]

the mirroring should be done with same size drives.

if you have a scsi controler the raid will most likely be set up on that with scsi drives. what board do you have?

[jamestobin]

i have a MSI K7N2 Delta-IL (MS-6729) motherboard.

Thanks

[bubba]

first, the specs for the board say you have SATA raid set up not SCSI.

so you could get 2 new sata drives and set them up for mirroring. as for using one to mirror you main drive ???? you would have to read up in your user manual for that. I would look at the online ver but I'm on dial up at the moment, it would take to forever to dl.

[SkAiN]

Looking at the specs for your motherboard, it appears that you can have a RAID array consisting of either 2 SATA drives, or 1 SATA + 1 IDE drive. Optimally, you would want to use the 2 SATA's, but you could add a SATA drive if your existing hard drive is IDE. Just make sure they're the same size--any extra space on the larger drive is wasted. You will need to make changes to your BIOS, enabling RAID on the correct channels, so your computer treats them as an array and not 2 separate drives. You can then format and partition them as you would any other hard drive.

Regarding your SCSI card, if you want to use that for RAID, you will need to consult the instruction manual that came with the card. Every SCSI card is slightly different in how they setup RAID.

Hope this helps.

[JTanczos]

Be VERY careful how you setup raid. Backup all info if you can because it would be very easy to set up an array and while its "building" the array it is actually formatting the drives.

Promise can supposidly copy drives but all ive used will wipe out everything and STILL take a half hour to "duplicate" the drives. I am not entirelly sure of highpoint as I have never actually set it up using this.

Make sure if you have a SATA that you get the same speed and size, preferably the same drive model itself. In any case BACK UP EVERYTHING before you try just to be safe.

JT