Change faulty Raid 1 IDE Hard Drive or upgrade to Larger SATA

Lynton

Lynton

Lynton

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Joined
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Live in UK
Hi everyone

I am running WXP SP3 with Raid 1 (2 X 20 Gb IDE WD200, Western Digital).

The Motherboard is GA-81945P-G. Data shows it has 4 X Serial ATA II 3.0 Gb connectors.

Sometime ago, whenever I switched on there was a clicking sound which I later managed to diagnose as one faulty Hard Drive.

As the IDE Hard Drives are now becoming obsolete, I consider it would be best and cheaper in time, to change to Serial ATA Drives and upgrade to larger ones, say 2 X 50 Gb.

I am not an expert, but if anyone is able to offer step by step, detailed advice I should be able to do this, with thanks to you.


Lynton:)
 
Lynton said:
...upgrade to larger ones, say 2 X 50 Gb.
Click to expand...

You're a bit behind the times mate, you can get 1000GB of storage for about 50 quid now :p

RAID0 with consumer drives really isn't such a good idea as it is a pain to set up. Any modern 1TB drive will be significantly faster than an old IDE drive RAID array. My suggestion would be if you really want the performance benefit is to buy a 120GB SSD + 500GB/1TB HDD. Or just buy a single HDD, it'll still be light years ahead of your old drives
 
20GB drives will have horrible performance, even in raid. 2x50GB would also be terrible, if you don't need the space you would be much better off with a 64GB SSD over any raid setup at those sizes.
 
Guys he is running a mirror not a stripe.

@OP, if your system was doing what you wanted then no need to go overboard, you can pick up a couple of SATA II or III drives quite cheap now (SATA III performance is useless for HDD's, its mainly for SSD's) which will be very large and quick by comparison to your old 20GB PATA drives.
 
Also no point in SATA III drives given his mobo can only run them at SATA II, unless he's planning on changing motherboard soon (which seems unlikely as is s775 - pretty modern relative to 20GB HDs!)
 
Hello

Thanks to everyone for your helpful advice.

I intend to go for 2X128 Gb SATA SSds. SSDs as suggested for my Motherboard.

Whilst I know a little about PCs, I do not know enough to install and set up these Drives.

Can someone please give me some detailed advice sufficient for a novice.
 
They are no different than a normal HD. Plug it in (making sure your PSU has sata power connectors - adapters are cheap if not).

Any Intel, Samsung or Crucial SSD is good. Personally I think an 830 128/256Gb would be the best bet as they are fairly cheap ATM.

Don't get hung up on benchmarks, 99% of the time you won't notice a jot of difference between them.

Any reason why your getting two 128GBs? A single 256Gb would be better as I'm not sure the rest of your system warrants RAID 0 SSDs...
 
Last edited:
trim is not that important though? its a 50% hit on write performance over a long period of time, the drives should still be considerably faster than his old setup even without trim.
 
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