hughes627
Member
+0|6701|Scotland
I just bought a WD Serial Raptor 10,000rpm sata and a WD 250Gb Sata drive, can i transfer the files from my ide drive to the 250Gb sata drive to save me having to reinstall windows and games etc? How would i configure these drive i.e. i hear peaple going on about a raid 0 and 3 configurations. Am i best just having my games on the raptor for maximum performance? Any help would be well appreciated!!
Rakasan
Member
+7|6847|California, USA
I used the utility floppy that came with the WD disk and copied data to the new disk (it booted), but that was with both IDE drives.  Not sure if it works for IDE and SATA since that was like 4 yrs ago.  I am about the SCSI now!

edit: when I said copied, I meant the utility did the copying

Last edited by Rakasan (2006-01-19 07:07:40)

hughes627
Member
+0|6701|Scotland
i will wait and see what comes with the drives tomorrow, my system dosent have a floppy drive so i hope this aint gonna cause me a headache:)
Scorpion0x17
can detect anyone's visible post count...
+691|6776|Cambridge (UK)

hughes627 wrote:

I just bought a WD Serial Raptor 10,000rpm sata and a WD 250Gb Sata drive, can i transfer the files from my ide drive to the 250Gb sata drive to save me having to reinstall windows and games etc? How would i configure these drive i.e. i hear peaple going on about a raid 0 and 3 configurations. Am i best just having my games on the raptor for maximum performance? Any help would be well appreciated!!
Data files can just be copied across from within windows itself, but you'll need a utility to move the system files across 'cos they can't all be copied from within windows itself - as rakasan said, you may get a utility with the drive to do this, if not, look at buying Norton Ghost - it's not cheap, but it is worth it...
hughes627
Member
+0|6701|Scotland
I have got norton ghost with system works but i disabled it, will this just copy an image of my whole drive?
How would i put the drives is raid 0 or 3 what is best? sorry to be a pest but its my first change from ide to sata. Thanks for the reply
chuyskywalker
Admin
+2,439|6858|"Frisco"

Forget raid, I don't think you bought the right stuff for it. Generally speaking, RAID is best done with identical drives, not mix and match. Also, if you're going to do any raid you'll be looking at 0 or 1. I doubt you'll do more than those. Please research RAID before you do it -- it's not just point and click, and if you don't know what you are doing, you can easily loose all your data.

If you are looking to copy files over verbatim (bit for bit) and don't have a floppy drive, check into The Ultimate Boot CD which I am sure has a good HD duplication utility on it.
Scorpion0x17
can detect anyone's visible post count...
+691|6776|Cambridge (UK)
By 'copy an image', do you mean 'create a file that contains the entire contents' or do you mean 'copy the entire contents from HDD to another'? well, in either case, the answer is yes.

Now, RAID, right, for a start you need a motherboard or expansion card with a RAID controller on it - if you don't know whether yours does google it.
Also you need two or more HDDs to be able to use RAID - and usually they need to be either all IDE or all SATA.
Now, RAID 0 is also known as 'striping' - in this mode the data is split between the two or more HDDs in stripes - so the first block of data is stored on the first drive, then the second is block is stored on the second, then the 3rd goes on the first drive, 4th on second and so on.
RAID 3 is 'mirroring' - everything that is stored one drive is copied to one or more mirrors.
With RAID 0 you get to use the full capacity of all the disks (so 2x160GB HDDs RAID 0 = 320GB striped), but with RAID 3 you only get the capacity of one drive (so, 2x160GB HDDs RAID 3 = 160GB mirrored).
chuyskywalker
Admin
+2,439|6858|"Frisco"

As a side note, SATA does not mean RAID. SATA is just the new hard disk interface. It's exactly like IDE except faster and with a smaller connector.

RAID is the process of combining multiple drives into one Virtual drive (one drive the computer can see) for either increased performance, reliabilty, or data security. RAID can be done over most interfaces: IDE, SCSI, SATA, etc.
chuyskywalker
Admin
+2,439|6858|"Frisco"

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

RAID 3 is 'mirroring' - everything that is stored one drive is copied to one or more mirrors.
With RAID 0 you get to use the full capacity of all the disks (so 2x160GB HDDs RAID 0 = 320GB striped), but with RAID 3 you only get the capacity of one drive (so, 2x160GB HDDs RAID 3 = 160GB mirrored).
NO!

Raid 1 is mirroring. Raid 3 is NOT mirroring. It's actually stripping at a bit level with a dedicated parity disk and it requires 3 drives minimum. Both of you need to read up :p

Scorpion0x17
can detect anyone's visible post count...
+691|6776|Cambridge (UK)

chuyskywalker wrote:

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

RAID 3 is 'mirroring' - everything that is stored one drive is copied to one or more mirrors.
With RAID 0 you get to use the full capacity of all the disks (so 2x160GB HDDs RAID 0 = 320GB striped), but with RAID 3 you only get the capacity of one drive (so, 2x160GB HDDs RAID 3 = 160GB mirrored).
NO!

Raid 1 is mirroring. Raid 3 is NOT mirroring. It's actually stripping at a bit level with a dedicated parity disk and it requires 3 drives minimum. Both of you need to read up :p

Ooops... Yeah... Sorry Hughes - Chuy's right... damn those bloody raid numbers - why they couldn't have just called them 'striping', 'mirroring' and 'parity' from the begining I don't know...
hughes627
Member
+0|6701|Scotland
hey guys thanks for all the help much appreciated ended up having to get a new motherboard as my old one didn't support sata2 and from there it snowballed ended up having to get new graphics card and psu! oh well its gonna be worth it seeing the fps go up

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