I have a new Seagate sata III 6gb/s and need advice on raid 0 or just using sing

[sean00]

Hello,
I have a new Seagate sata III 6gb/s. My old sata Western digitial is 3gb/s
(yes they will both run at 6gb/s - is there a free tools to check these speeds?) and its like 4-5 years old. Its time to replace it. I need advice. I am going to install windows 7 on the new sata drive. I was going to just use the old drive for backup, or storing random files ya know, in conjuction with my 2 1tb external drives. I am a gamer, and I do a lot of school work(programming, spreadsheets,databases). I am more concerned with game performance. Will configuring a raid 0 be beneficial, or should I just go with the new single sata drive?

 

[sean00]

After reading more on the subject I thnk I will just install win 7 on the new sata and use the old hd for data storage.

 

[sean00]

Ok now my next question. What is the best way to clear the data from the old C: drive? Should I use diskpart and what commands should I use? Partition magic? I don't see a way to do it in MMC console, disk management.

 

[photonboy]

Since you likely want a single partiton just format it.

I strongly advise that you do a FULL FORMAT which will take a long time. Probably 12 hours or so for a 1TB drive.

Why do a FULL FORMAT? A quick format simply make your hard drive ready to add files. However, a FULL format will read and write every single location and will NOT write to any spot it deems defective. It builds up a table of bad sectors.

If you don't do a FULL FORMAT then you could easily write data to a bad sector and never know it thus having problems later.

Procedure:
1. Boot Windows to the SSD (not the hard drive)

2. START-> "Computer"-> Hard drive-> right-click-> Format -> (choose "NTFS", label if you wish, and UNCHECK the quick format)

3. WAIT!

You can do other things will the drive formats, just don't turn off the computer (or you'll have to restart).

 

[photonboy]

Other:
If you only want ONE partition, or wish to add a partition, or resize them use Disk Management tool you mentioned.

For example, to delete both partitions and just make one:

1. right-click each partition and DELETE it until you have a single volume of UNALLOCATED SPACE

2. then right-click and create a single VOLUME (I think a non-boot volume is an extended volume but you can confirm that.)

3. Finally, do a full format as mentioned in my above post.

 

[sean00]

THanks for the advice. I just went through hell getting it installed but finally got it. Originally, I didn't erase the data on C: so the new sata had drive letter of B. I can't install most of my games on this drive lol..has to be C. Then I ended up installing Win 7 on external drive. Finally, got it installed on the new sata drive and everything is fine!