Say I have a 2TB Hard Drive that is damn near full. Then get another 2TB Hard Drive. I want to put these 2 drive into a RAID 0. How would one go about doing this, while persevering the data on the first drive without using an External Drive. There is a Separate SSD drive for the OS and related the is about 128GBs. Can anything be done?
It was always my understanding that you need to setup the RAID when you are installing the OS. Meaning, both drives have to be fresh off a format in order to work together in RAID. I could be wrong, but that is what I always thought.
Why do you want to put them in RAID 0? If a drive fails you lose ALL data, striped across both drives. And in order to preserve the data you will have to do some sort of backup (DVDs, external drive, USB). I'd recommend to prevent data loss if you want to put then in RAID 1 (Mirrored Array).
Well, this is for a friend. He doesn't care about data loss. He wants speed. All speed. I'm just looking to see if there is a way to do this. Also, Think it's possible to compress 2TB down to about 300gb?
When you setup the RAID 0 (striped disks), you will lose data on both drives when creating the array. So its advisable to backup the data on the drives BEFORE creating the RAID arrays. Here is a not so cool trick i used once: bought a drive the size i wanted to backup, did the backup, setup everything quickly again and brought back the drive (after zeroing the entire drive to clean it out and removed all partitions) the very same day to the store saying it doesn't meet the speed expectation and get refunded (at a shop i knew they did full refund) but don't tell anyone
It is possible (short-stroking) just search google for a tutorial, as I'm not sure exactly on the steps on how to do it.
I've done research on the whole short stroking thing, and it doesn't look like it would work. It just keeps all the data (OS) on the outermost section of the platters, and disregards the rest of the platter. I think backing up is going to be the only option. Is there any poissiblity to compress 2TB down to 300GB?
Well RAID 0 is purely for speed reasons, so by keeping the data on 1 drive (if you could) would defeat the object of Striping it. My drive is RAID 0 Striped 2 x 160Gb SATA and it kills everything on the drive when you are in the BIOS setting it up
You will have to back that data up somewhere, setup the array, format the drives, install the OS and then copy all the data back across. It might be better to buy a pair of smaller, fast drives, put them in a striped array 0 and leave the 2tb drive as a seperate data drive. Arguably, you wont need all your data on the raid 0. Just a suggestion
