If theres 1 thing i still dont understand. Its Raid.

Ok i understand what it does but how can i go raid?

Yes I have 2 Sata Hard drives.

But; do they need to be the same?

Please could someone clear this up for me

Many Thanks Brad

Depends on the type of raid

Clicky

graphical clicky

so it puts 2 hhd's together and makes them become 1 big hdd?

or mirrors one hdd with another

Stripe or mirror. Thats the choice with 2 HDDs.

Raid 1: A mirror from one to the other means if one drive dies you have all your data intact. 2 x 500GB drives would only give you 500GB usable space, for example.

Raid 0: Data is distributed over both discs (striped) for (theoretically) improved performance. 2 x 500GB drives would give you 1TB usable space, for example. If one disc goes down though you lose all data.

Raid 1+0: Stripe AND mirror. If you had four discs you could stripe across two and mirror to the other two. You get the speed and the redundancy but need a lot more discs. 4 x 500GB would only give you 1TB.

Raid 5: Discs are striped with one for parity. You could use as few as three discs but you lose one. 3 x 500GB would give you 1TB. If one disc goes down your data remains intact and you can replace the damage disc. The array will then rebuild itself.

So how can i make my 2 hard drives become 1 what RAID configuration is that?

Raid 0 I guess is what you want then.

But you'll have to do a clean format first.
Also remember to backup as if 1 drive dies you lose everything.

You will need to download the raid drivers for your motherboard


Are you using XP or Vista ?

For XP you then need to do a clean install and install the raid drivers when it asks you for the Raid / SCSI drivers ( or Nlite a copy of XP as I did)



I did mirroring as wanted the extra protection as don’t see any need for the marginal increase in speed at Raid 0 would give. If I want more space I will have separate disks

Think it was Ben who gave me the link originally, but have a looksy here

Edd

You can do it in software too, from the disk management panel.

eeeewww Software RAID. Yuk.

Nothing like slowing down your computer for no reason

I've not seen noticeable performance losses with ZFS software raid...Though I must admit I've not seen any performance gains. I've got a two mirrors atm, will be upgrading to a RAIDz/Raid-5 when I upgrade my motherboard.

I agree, hardware all the way.

But if you can't do hardware, then software is definitely better than nothing. You'll be up sh*t creek without a paddle if you lose a drive otherwise.

Don't forget: Mirroring DOES NOT protect from idiotic (accidental) deletion