Raid 0 question

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fldrummer

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All my hard drives are full!!

I want a raid 0 set up. I have a 120gig HD thats full and have a new in the box one. Can I use them both as a raid 0?? I have no place to back up the full 120 so I would have to be able to plug it in while it's full. Will I have to reformat losing all my data? If so I'll have to just use one HD on the raid cause I cant afford to lose the stuff. THANKS
 
Yes you would have to format the drive once you have setup a raid-0 array. Have to find some way to put your important stuff somewhere else temporarily.....
 
Do you know what raid 0 really means?

There is no such thing as raid 0 (or any raid configuration) with just one hard drive as you suggest in your last sentence.
You can add another hard drive to your computer without any problems and data loss.
Raid 0, a striped set of hard drives, is a different story. Like Daffydrunk said, when setting up raid 0, you'll have to format the first drive in the process which means you lose all data.

In your case, I'd say just forget about raid for now and add the second hard disk as a separate drive.
 
Well..Right now I have an 80gig for computer files and 120 for audio and other stuff. I have another 120gig sitting around I want to add because I'm out of space. So I have to add some kinda pci card to give me the ata so why not raid 0. I want to use the 2 120's for the raid. Hmm...this is gonna be tricky.
 
You might be able to get you music files down to where you can put them on your 80 gb drive. Once you clean out all the extra takes you're not using in your songs, the tracks will become alot smaller. On some of the stuff I've done in acid where I might have 5+ takes for each part, I've found I can clean out alot of stuff to where each song and all the wavs will easily fit on a cd. Depending on what resolution you record at, not sure if that would help or not but you might be able to do a little house cleaning on your music stuff to aid backing up for the reformat to raid-0. Maybe even temporarily uninstall apps and stuff to shrink the size of the 80gb data to free up more space to backup. Then you can leave the 80gb as the bootable/software drive with the raid-0 as drive D for your data....
 
Raid 0 is fast. But if 1 drive fries you lose the lot. You still need to backup the important stuff to the non raid drive
 
RAID 0 is less reliable than a single drive is. I don't think it's worth losing everything on two discs for, if one of them fails.
 
Ditto. If you're gonna use raid-0 you really should get a bootable drive that's big enough to have you OS/software as well as a place to backup the raid array. The size of the bootable drive depends on how much stuff you think you'll backup from the raid, but you might want to get a 200 GB bootable drive so you can still have 160-180 of it for raid-0 backup. Then get an app like handy backup or write a xcopy batch routine you can run once in a while.
Nice thing about this is if the raid does fail, you can immediately continue working on your songs. I've done a several raid-0 setups and have had only one failure so far. had a 30 GB seagate go belly up. Handy Backup automatically backed up the drive every day so the guy didn't lose hardly anything exept a few guitar solo takes the day it died... It's been fine for a couple years since that happened though.
 
Wow...I didn't know that raid 0 crashes more than normal. I think I'll just get another IDE controller. Speed would be nice but not worth losing my files!
 
It's not that it crashes more than normal, but since your spanning your data across 2 drives every other sector, your are dependant on two drives not failing which increases your odds of failure. If you have a good backup the speed is worth it. You really should have a bullet proof backup regardless of what your drive setup is though. I've had alot of luck with RAID-O, but I have seen 1 raid array fail when one of the drives glitched.
One thing I've figured out over the years is the better backup you have the less likely your computer will glitch. Kind of a Murphy's law sort of thing.
 
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