advice on installing raptor

[abstractquest]

hey everyone

i recently purchased a WD 37 gb raptor, and decided i would put windows and most non-gaming programs on it. I have no connectivity problems, so can i just install the raptor, copy the windows folder (plus related documents and settings, etc), and switch the boot priority to the raptor? Plus, I already have two nearly-full 160 GB ATA hard drives, and would like to RAID them together in RAID 0. is it possible to set up the configuration with information already on?

 

[Nocturnal]

If I understand what you're asking, no, you cannot just copy the Windows folder over and then have it boot from the Raptor. Your best bet is to backup all the data you need and or just hook your primary drive that you have now as a slave drive. Use the Raptor as the master. You will have to reinstall Windows onto your Raptor hard drive for optimal performance. Also, I am almost positive that you cannot raid your two drives together without losing the data on it.

 

[abstractquest]

thanks nocturnal, that answers my question perfectly!

so now i should just back up my 160 GBs and then set up the RAID right

 

[Nocturnal]

Yes, I'd recommend backing up your data prior to creating the raid array.

 

[stevty2889]

I wouldn't raid the raptor and the 160gb drive together at all, just use the raptor as your main drive, and the 160gb drive for backups/storage.

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
I wouldn't raid the raptor and the 160gb drive together at all, just use the raptor as your main drive, and the 160gb drive for backups/storage.

your 160gb will become a 37gb drive, and what would be the point if you are not running identical drives 'cuz of speed loss in the 10k rpm vs 7.2k rpm and the waste of gigabytes. you'll get the benchmarks, but as far as system stability goes, it may not be the best to run it for extended periods of time. but like any enthusiast, you have to see it to believe it, so hands down everyone and let him see for himself

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: abstractquest
hey everyone

i recently purchased a WD 37 gb raptor, and decided i would put windows and most non-gaming programs on it. I have no connectivity problems, so can i just install the raptor, copy the windows folder (plus related documents and settings, etc), and switch the boot priority to the raptor? Plus, I already have two nearly-full 160 GB ATA hard drives, and would like to RAID them together in RAID 0. is it possible to set up the configuration with information already on?

If you read his post, he was planning on raiding two 160GB hard drives, not the Raptor and a 160GB.

 

[Greenman]

The new Raptor drive come with a utility to copy your existing windows partition to it. Or you can dl it from WD. Works like a charm.
And no, you can not set up your two existing drives as a raid 0 and keep the data. Everything will be lost when you set up the array.

 

[abstractquest]

thanks guys for the advice

i should have asked this earlier, but does anyone know if i will see significant results if I do set up a RAID 0 (with speed)? If not, it would save time

(The two Hds are 160GB WD umm 7200rpm...)

 

[Viper27]

Raid 0 may be faster, but if one of the drives crashes, or something goes wrong, you lose the data on BOTH drives.
That said, you must determine if the performance boost will be worth the risk of losing all of the data on the drives for yourself.

 

[KoolDrew]

i should have asked this earlier, but does anyone know if i will see significant results if I do set up a RAID 0 (with speed)?

There will be no difference in performance.

StoragReview:

The enthusiasm of the power user community combined with the marketing apparatus of firms catering to such crowds has led to an extraordinarily erroneous belief that striping data across two or more drives yields significant performance benefits for the majority of non-server uses. This could not be farther from the truth! Non-server use, even in heavy multitasking situations, generates lower-depth, highly-localized access patterns where read-ahead and write-back strategies dominate. Theory has told those willing to listen that striping does not yield significant performance benefits. Some time ago, a controlled, empirical test backed what theory suggested. Doubts still lingered- irrationally, many believed that results would somehow be different if the array was based off of an SATA or SCSI interface. As shown above, the results are the same. Save your time, money and data- leave RAID for the servers!

Anandtech

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

 

[stevty2889]

Originally posted by: abstractquest
thanks guys for the advice

i should have asked this earlier, but does anyone know if i will see significant results if I do set up a RAID 0 (with speed)? If not, it would save time

(The two Hds are 160GB WD umm 7200rpm...)

I had raid-0 raptors for a while, I got maybe a few seconds faster with booting windows, and a few seconds faster with games loading, but no major improvements. If you upgrade often, it would be a good idea to get a PCI or PCIe SATA raid card, because another thing with raid, if you were to swtich motherboards, and it didnt' have the exact same raid controller..it wouldn't be able to read your existing raid array, and you would lose all your data..Really not worth the trouble if you ask me.