Hd and Raid questions

[darren1980]

Hi all, newbie here

Iv had my system for two years now and I'm going to upgrade a few things since the prices are so good at the moment.

First of all my system,

AMD Athlon 63 x2 dual-core 4400+
XP SP1
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Mainboard
2x1024MB DDR400-PC3200 Memory (upgrading to 4GB with hd upgrade)
2x 250GB Maxtor SATA HD
2x Sony DVD Re-Writers
2x 512MB nVIDIA Geforce 7900GTX
Creative Labs Blaster Audigy 4

Few questions that i hope you can all help me with,

1. I'm looking to add a further 2x 1tb hd taking it to 2.5tb, I was thinking Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache, Any advice of how good or bad these drives are?

Iv had my original two hd running without raid as i never understood how to set up raid.

2. Which is the best way to set these drives up in raid to get full performance from them? Also is it possible to have both performance and back up ability?

3. Once the new drives are set up in raid is it possible to transfer the entire data from the original drives before there formatted and wiped for raid?

Sorry I'm a bit dumb on this matter.
Any info would be much appreciated.

Darren1980.

 

[rpstewart]

1. I'm looking to add a further 2x 1tb hd taking it to 2.5tb, I was thinking Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache, Any advice of how good or bad these drives are?

They're very good value for money although there are mixed thoughts on them. Some pretty decent opinions in this thread

2. Which is the best way to set these drives up in raid to get full performance from them? Also is it possible to have both performance and back up ability?

RAID0 stripes the data across the disks giving increased sustained read and write speeds at the expense of random access time and data security (one drive fails and everything is lost. There are redundant RAID levels which also provide increased sustained transfers (5,6,10 etc) but these are not backup solutions, all they provide is hardware redundancy in the event of a disk failure. They won't protect you from accidental deletion, data corruption etc.

3. Once the new drives are set up in raid is it possible to transfer the entire data from the original drives before there formatted and wiped for raid?

In theory you can image the contents of your existing disks onto a new RAID array but you may need to monkey about with drivers and BIOS settings before you start to ensure that the correct drivers are installed and running to allow the OS to boot from a RAID array.

 

[darren1980]

Thanks for the info rpstewert,
Think i'm going to go with the Samsung f1.

Darren1980