RE: Adding drives to my Media Server

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doh! - just reread your question and saw the point re the onboard RAID...

A couple of other things to note...

If you configure the 2 drives into a single RAID volume in hardware, it
will very highly likely be destructive to all the data on both drives.... -
you currently have your XP install on this drive... - do you want to retain
that, or are you happy to reformat & rebuild?... RAID controllers are
pretty much ignorant of partitions, and only see/care about/talk to
physical disks as a single unit for the purposes of building a RAID set...

Also, is your 80GB drive already partioned into more than 1, or is it a
single big 80GB partition? - you're likely to need/want to split it into
two for some of the options that are available to you.... so you may need
to get in there with partition magic or its ilk to tinker with the
partitioning.... - unless of course you're happy to reformat it to achieve
this, thus losing all your existing data... (did I say backup??)

Another thing you might want to consider, as an extension of my backup
suggestion in my previous reply, is using image backups to save your C:\
drive as well. (Norton Ghost or PQI ImageCenter spring to mind, but there
are others). I have always found it absolutely invaluable to always have an
image of the system drive stored on a seperate physical disk on every PC I
have ever built... - absolutely brilliant for rapid recovery from almost
anything that can go wrong with it!

Paul G.



________________________________

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx on behalf of Simon Ryley
Sent: Thu 19/01/2006 13:08
To: UKHA_D Group
Subject: [ukha_d] Adding drives to my Media Server



The time has come when the little 80Gb hard disc in my media server
isn't big enough to store all the pictures, mp3s and freeview recordings
we now have.  So I'm looking to upgrade..

Current spec is a Spinpoint SATA 80Gb, holding windows xp, a few gig of
photos, 10g of mp3s and the rest as freeview recordings.

For performance reasons, I'd like to put the recordings on a separate
drive, probably a 250Gb Spinpoint SATA.  This leaves me with an 80Gb
drive that will be barely used.  Is there any way in windows or
otherwise to combine the two drives to one big virtual drive, giving me
about 60Gb of extra recording space, and hopefully improving the data
throughput as I am using both Sata channels in parallel?  The
motherboard does support Raid, but I've not been down that route before.

Is this a sensible option, and if not, does anyone have a small
Spinpoint sata drive they no longer want?

Cheers,

Simon