Or put them on a different spindle (thinking out loud here.). Now I'll probably have to back them up daily. I have always kept documents and mail on a different partition, so if the opsys goes squirrelly(sp) I didn't care. I totally trust Acronis and my 160gb backup spindle would be replaced by the old 500 Hitachi, and later with a 1T in all liklihood. It means keeping very current on backup images. The "if a disk goes bad" scenario probably means that I learn about incremental backups - I've always used "full". Oh yeah, I totally forgot, with striping and 2 500's I get 1T. So it looks like single drive swap would raise me from 70 to 130 or so, and RAID would raise me to 220 or so.(John said 370/320 so that may be much higher) I didn't realize drives had changed that much. My current Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 SHOWS ABOUT 70 (All on HD Tune). Sammy reviews at about 135MB/s with the Sea right behind it. Short list is the Seagate ST3500418AS and the Samsung HD502HJ - both 500GB, both about $50 at my local Microcenter (which is very good for quick returns), and both, I believe, single platter. 11's with their 3 surfaces were problematic with RAID. (I have 6 ICH10R SATA sockets and 2 GA sockets) Yeah, I think I'll use them for my 2 opticals.
I'll post back what I wind up doing.ĭon't need to install MSM on Win7. Thanks much for all the education and info. The alternate at the moment is a single Sammy F3 or a Mushkin Callisto SSD. It's 2 weeks before sufficient funds allow the 2 new drives. So yeah, I'm at the knowledge point where "you should just try it". It did, however, want me to create a raid set (which I would then have to use Acronis to clone from my sincle spindle). However, once I set the bios to raid for the GA SATA controller, Win7 wouldn't load.
Gigabyte SATA controller - the exe expands and running setup looks like it installs GA drivers for RAID to Win7. or do I need Matrix running on Win7 to do raid on the ICH10R? Probably - else bsod probably Dunno! alternatively, I guess I could install iata (MSM) on Win7 (after setting bios ICH10R to raid), and do it there.
I had expected it to ask me to create a raid set (oh, I see looking at the manual at POST I have to press ctrl-I to get into what is effectively MSM). The system still booted though my boot spindle is plugged to the GA controller at the moment so I don't know it it would if plugged to the Intel. ICH10R - turning on RAID in the BIOS does indeed cause Win7 to spontaneously install the raid drivers and ask for a reboot. The 2 things I d/l'ed from gigabyte site were exe's - iata for intel (which won't run until you set bios to raid.) and an exe that expanded for GA. TI's UR feature can also insert the drivers as part of the restore. Windows can be switched to RAID or non-RAID. You have your backup, right? You could just revert back if it fails. So maybe that all blows my raid aspirations out the window.
No simple explanation as to how to do it. No way to force Win7 to load RAID drivers like I did for AHCI, and LOL - I just took a break and googled for how to, and various folks on ms social technet are saying "no you can't" and "why do you want to go to raid" and "you have to re-install". hmmm - I was planning on cloning (manual,same size) the spindle - is it possible to do that on the fly with Acronis? or would I need to do the bios thing to put raid on the drives, then manually create each partition.
"format partitions that they are 4k aligned". I do not know if that's the same with RAID. Only Win7 32bit here (Home pro oem - I build my own)Īh, yes - drivers (just grabbed them from the site) - I remember playing with AHCI a while back and it's a bit of the same thing, though I remember there was a registry setting that you could change to force it to load AHCI drivers in the OS proper.