Setting up for RAID 0, what about my old data?

[Bonehead]

I hacked a Ultra66 and I'm thinking to put two older hd together for Striping (IBM 13,5Gig and a Maxtor 10Gig, both 7200rpm but one with 2MB cache and one with 512kb). The one thing I didn't read in the downloaded manuel for the FastTrak is what to do if there is still all my data on one of the hd. Will all the old data become inaccessible (or erased) if I put the two hd togheter in RAID mode? Or shouldn't I worry about that?

[Stembolt]

If you intend to stripe the drives in RAID 0, you will have to partition and format the drives as a single striped drive. This will of course erase the data on both drives. You will need to backup your data to another location before you proceed.

BTW, you probably already know this, but it is preferable to use 2 identical drives in a striped array.

[Bonehead]

See it as an experiment. If this combination turns out it isn't worth the effort I will sell the Maxtor. NOTE: I can run the Maxtor at UDMA with the Ultra66/FastTrak with a PCI of 37,5 MHz, before that I had to run it at PIO 4 (UDMA disabled) with the mainboard IDE controller to stop messing up windows.

[Axel]

Can you back up what you want with a CD burner and reload it later?

I'd have to agree you can't set up the RAID properly unless you plan on formatting and reinitializing the drives and then RAID-ing them. Then bring in the old data off CD - then you know it'll be set.

But why RAID 0? With three fast drives, I'd definitely go to RAID 5 to vastly increase performance and data security..... The card you'd need and the software is a bit more expensive, but RAID 5 is worth it in the long haul.

[Stan]

RAID5... there are only 2 cards that do RAID5: the Adaptec AAA-UDMA and the Promise SuperTrak.

It all depends on what you want to do with your PC.
RAID0 (stripe) is faster than RAID5 (stripe with parity), but RAID5 offers redundancy. If you implement RAID0 and if one HD dies, then all your data is gone !

You could implement RAID1 (mirror). You will have redundancy and still will see an improvement in speed (but not as high as RAID1 or 5).

At home, my server use a FasTrak in RAID0 (2 IBM). My gaming PC has 4 IBM in RAID0... no redundancy but it is **** fast !

Stan

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-25-2000).]