Adding a hard drive? raid 0?

[jijoslin]

I have a samsung spinpoint f3 1tb with windows 7 pro installed with no partitions, I mainly use my system for gaming, can I clone my data somehow to add a second drive for a raid 0 configuration, also what benefits for gaming?

 

[Paperdoc]

To switch to RAID0 you would pretty much have to start from scratch and re-install everything. That means FIRST making a complete backup to some external media. Then after you have the new system running, you would copy back all the user-created files.

The basic problem is that there is no way to migrate your existing data to a RAID0 array. Even cloning won't quite do it, because your machine cannot boot from a RAID0 array unless it had a RAID driver installed as part of the original OS Install process, and I'm sure you did not do that.

What benefits? I don't use RAID0, but ask hard questions about this. It used to be that a RAID0 array was significantly faster that a single HDD - about a decade ago. Today the SATA 3.0 Gb/s new drives are so fast that RAID0 makes only a small improvement in speed. (Oh, and the SATA 6.0 Gb/s HDDs are NOT faster than those. Only the non-mechanical SSD units are faster than SATA 3.0 (aka SATA II)).

Understand that users of RAID0 really need to practise regular complete backups. A RAID0 array is twice as likely to fail as a single drive, and when it does everything in the array is lost. A reliable recent backup is the only way to recover.

 

[jijoslin]

Best answer selected by jijoslin.