Raid Array

Hi,

I just bought an M17x R3 from the Aussie Dell online store, and I only had the option for the 750GB HDDs in Raid 0. But I want to break that and make it two separate drives. But I don't want to lose all the Alienware customisations.

What would be the best way to do this?

OT RANT:It sucks so much that in the aussie store, you can't customise the Alienware laptops near the level of what you can on the US one.

 

you should be able to use alienrespawn to make your backup....then break the raid and restore it to the single drive.. But why would you want to do this... you would loose perfomance....yesterday i posted some benchmarks about the differences
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/563769-need-help-benching-my-r3-disk-drive.html

 

Some people prefer being safe than sorry for doing it because of its small gain in performance confronted with the fact that if one of the raided drive fails all data is compromised.
I think it's a choice one should make.
Want "performance"? Stick a SSD inside and it'll laugh at the magnetic RAID setup.

 

Yes, But SSD is not with out its faults. For example price/mb is WAY high still... even if price is no object the max size of the drives are still small and the fail rate of SSD is quite higher then magnetic.

But i agree that its a choice. Some one has to weigh all of these factors and decide.

 

Keeping the SSD for the OS / applications / games etc. will give you that performance and your data can be safe on a larger magnetic HDD in the 2nd slot/optical bay/usb enclosure.
And as for the rate of failure of the two,HDDs have a greater chance of failing then SSDs.
Trust me once you "taste" you'll never want to boot with a magnetic.
As for prices ,the 2nd Gen. Is probably half of what it used to cost last year, hence one can get a decent 120Gb for less than 200.

@MoltenTesseract what is it that you want to keep from your current install?
You can separate your drives, do a fresh install of Windows and I'm willing to help you restore whatever it is you want. If it's the looks/wallpapers/oem logo etc you can find a thread in the Alienware subforum where you can find all of this and restore the "looks and feel" of your alienware after a fresh install . Drivers available on Dells support page.

cheers

 

Yep. I HATE RAID0. Raid 5 or none IMHO.

TBH, I've got no idea till mine arrives at my door step. I'm not sure how much alienware have customised the OS. But I'd like all that customisation back again. So I wasnt sure if it was going to be viable to reinstall all those additions, or just do a clone copy.

 

Don't worry about the customisation, you should be able to restore everything and it'll look the same only without the nasty bloatware

 

Just to make a few corrections. You can't backup a raid 0 setup to a single drove. You'll get a bsod on boot due to the different drivers.

Also ssds do not have a higher failure rate than magnetic drives. Ssds have no moving parts making them a safer option. True they can get quite pricey.

 

I havent tried this but i think i might have to disagree on the BSOD. First of all dell shiped even sigle drive setups with RAID turned on in the bios. Second the aleinware image is syspreped therefore it is going to redetect the MSD (mass storage drivers) upon startup. I am fairly sure this will work. Windows 7 is much more forgiving then XP was in this regard.

 

I've tried it with Win 7. Havn't gone RAID to single drive, but single drive to RAID didn't work, so it is possible. Who knows.

 

According to your signature you also are working off a R2....for some performance reason dell recomends leaving the HDD set to raid even for single drive configs on the R3. I think this my play a part in it working. I would doubt dell created a seporate alienrespawn image just for people with a RAID0 in the R3. I am tempted to put a seporat hard drive in there and test restoring to a single dirive, but im just not that motivated just to check. I am currous though. If i do end up putting a SSD in there, i see no point in doing a restore, clean install is the way to go in that situation for sure.

 

I do image restores all the time too ssds and see zero performance difference. As long as alignment is good all should be well

 

Ok. Cool thanks mate. I've seen most of the stuff around here, I just haven't seen a way to restore the windows rating customisation thing yet.