noob question about my new m17x

I just got my m17x a couple of hours ago. Love it so far. One thing I noticed though is that the 2 500Gb drives are not in raid 0 like they are supposed to be. (I checked my order and it clearly says Raid 0).

Anyways, before I go ahead and enable raid 0 in the bios, is there anything on the hidden partition that I won't be able to redownload from the dell support site. I really love the command center. Is there anything I have to worry about backing up from the factory install before I wipe the drives clean?

 

What up n00b!?! You might lose the recoveray partition, but there isn't anything on the system that can't be downloaded from dell.com support site. If fact you should have a ressource disk, but your best bet will still be to download everything from dell.com What I would suggest is first download all programs and drivers from dell.com You can get command center and everything there. Then put it on a thumb drive, then do a new fresh install, than load all drivers and programs. If your using RAID 0, I recommand regular backups of any valuable data. If one HDD dies, you lose everything. So ensure you do regular backups.

 

Thank you. That is exactly what I'll do, it will go pretty easy with all the drivers my usb. Thanks once again for the advice.

 

No problem, and welcome to Notebook review. Stick around as this is a great resource filled with knowledge and can work out almost any issue here or just read and learn. Enjoy the system.

 

You probably already checked but is there a chance they are in RAID 0 but they split the array into 2 partitions 500GB each? That would make it look like 2 drives in Windows.

 

See, I thought that Raid 0 made copies of everything on each drive so that A) it would run faster because it would have access to two HDD's, B) if one crashed, you wouldn't lose all your info. Dell tech told me the "B"... the "A" I just assumed. Follow me?

Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

RAID 0 has faster performance by "striping" your data back and forth between both drives. Each drive only has "half" of your data. Also gives you the total space of both drives added together. No backup protection at all, actually doubles the risk of a failure as either drive failure and you will lose all your data.

RAID 1 has basically the same performance of a single drive and "mirrors" the data written to one drive, to the other. This way you always have a backup. No performance gain and only the storage space of the single drive.

You have to choose one or the other, you can't go back and forth without a complete reinstall. Many choose the performance of RAID 0 over having the redundancy of RAID 1. It all depends on your informantion, space needs, and how comfortable you backing up your data.

 

As said RAID 0 with halve the mean time between failures of the drives. Your performance will be higher due to the striping across both drives splitting your data up but your access times will increase slightly also as it takes more time to find the data (slightly is relative eh). The other thing to remember with RAID 0 is the stripe size, the default is usually around 64kb while larger sizes favour larger files and smaller sizes favour smaller files in terms of performance therefore the logic goes that 64kb will strike a decent balance but also minimise your "dead" space. Dead space is where if you have a 20kb file and it's saved it'll be split and saved as a 10kb file on each hard drive but taking up a 64kb sector on each thereby wasting 108kb of space! With a 64kb stripe size a larger file is split into 64kb chunks and saved to each HDD, as you can see this overhead in the work of splitting the data and so on can also be a hinderance. Overall RAID 0 represents a faster system, but makes a HDD failure more likely so as DR650SE says make sure you back up regularly maybe set your most used folders to auto-backup or something. Oh and to sum up what I said, smaller stripe size leads to less dead space but lower performance and vice versa, of course this is all marginal and you may not "feel" or "notice" the differences anywho just my little effort to try help you understand a bit about RAID 0. It's purely a performance increase it's gives no redundancy kinda funny . Hope it helps. They need ads about backing up data like the condom ads, it's not safe without!

 

Great response! Thanks man!

 

LOL DeWinte, just saw your comment too... thanks for the extra info. I'm a backup freak... but with all the video editing stuff I'm doing these days in HD, the files are getting larger and all of the sudden... 500g isn't a "waste of space".... dual Terrabite drives wouldn't be bad for what I do, but I'm poor. Just I have a few powered harddrives at home that I back everything up on via USB..... then I disconnect and unplug it. So many people have backup HDD's fail... unpluging them can be the best thing you could do. (after you properly shut them down if needed)

 

Indeed it's good to treat external drives well. If you need additional space later what you can do is use the eSATA port with either a power over eSATA or just a normal eSATA connection and power adapter. AFAIK power over eSATA enclosures for laptops are quite difficult to find but in the Sony Vaio F series owners lounge they've talked about the ones they have I can search up the names if you want for future reference. Otherwise you could use a normal eSATA external drive possibly up to around 1TB for relatively cheap such as the Hitachi G-Drive which provides around 94MB/s throughput sequential read/write. So you'll get performance enough over eSATA to consider using it as an extra 1TB for some of your video editing as the interface is pretty quick (can be anyway). Just a thought .

 

Yeah man, that info would be great... honestly, I don't know what brand I'm using right now. It was a mark-down powered USB 500g external that i picked up at walmart. It really apealed to me for only $80 at the time because (besides being marked almost half-off) the fact that you could hook it up to your PC and just puch the button on it and it backed up everything automatically.... unfortunately, you couldn't really select which files to back up and which to leave alone. I have a very detailed way of keeping things organized and I will actually waste space and copy things in two places on my PC for cateloging purposes. Kinda hard to explain why.... but I'm forgetful, so if I'm looking for a specific event for say my band... but I know it had footage of my fiance' dancing like a hooker and I wanted to pull it up as proof... well, I may dig around all day in a file with her name on it - totally forgetting that it was actually a band video. Then if I put it in her folder - obviously, I'd have the same issue if looking for the band footage.... so I just make copies in both places. Shortcuts don't always work... they bug out sometimes for editing purposes. Another example... I would have all of my band's documents in the band's folder which contains everything for the band... but I would also have a copy of that folder in my personal documents for the same kinds of reasons. Shortcuts work better in these situations but document files are so small that they usually don't make much of a diff anyways. Same with photos... I've got a "band photos" folder that has pics from all our shows arranged by date then venue... but I may have some of those copied if there were pics of my family members. Again, if the fiance' was there - I'd copy those photos in her specific folder as well.

I'm sure you get the point.

So anyways... I do enough "space wasting" as is. I very much dislike it copying everything. I don't want it backing up stuff that I already have backed up as well and it does that when I press the button. So when I open the interface on the external HDD after pressing the auto-copy button several times.... I end up with several copies of all my files on my cmoputer's HDD.

PLUS, for some reason, I can't get it to copy game files and settings with the auto feature. I have to literally open the E-HDD and then open up the system file for the game and click and drag the files as needed. For MMO's... there are updates all the time. I like to have those all backed up so that when my PC crashes.... I can literally have my computer back EXACTLY the way I had it before within a couple hours.

Is there some sort of awesome awesomness that I can buy that has a great programable interface that will allow me to select folders to "monitor and then only copy what's new? That's what I need.

Then, I'd buy two... one for obvious reasons... and I'd leave it plugged in to always keep me 100% current... and then set up another E-HDD to copy the first E-DD once a week, which I would pull out of a fire safe box under the desk to save me in the worst case scenario.

I'm so paranoid about my E-HDD right now man... it has video footage of my dad that kicked the bucket in 08' at only 48yrs old. There's not much footage of him OR pictures... I've backed everything up on that HD and I keep a single folder on my PC's as well... so that if one goes poof - I have the other.

omg... dude, I wrote a frikkin novel... I'd love to find an easier way to do this stuff. I've always wanted to have two HDD's in my system... one for programs and one for my files. But the idea of speed is more tempting at the moment. Sorry for the long reply that's kind of off topic.

 

Yea I get the importance of some data, I'd go as far as burning the stuff from your father to dvd's also and maybe even sticking them in dropbox (google it if you don't know it has 2GB free online storage if I remember right).

Ok then an example of a power over eSATA enclosure would be like this or this. Both are external enclosures one is 2.5" the other 3.5" so you'd have to buy the corresponding size HDD to put into them, if I find the brand that the guys from the Sony forum used again I'll post it. The ones they had were power over eSATA and was just one cable for power & data and it seems a great solution but with a 500GB maximum. The external 3.5" cases with the external power adapters will be able to handle larger HDD's.

Then onto dedicated external eSATA disks there are things like Cavalry, another Cavalry and G-Drive. There are many other eSATA solutions but these are a few, some will include backup software and some wont unfortunately, although you can make use of websites such as this one to find information on back up software so you can find a back up solution that works for you!

If none of this works then ofc you could get a simple USB 2.0 drive with it's backup software but ofc you'll have around 1/3-1/2 the performance you'd get with eSATA, it's a shame eSATA isn't more mainstream. Yet another option would be the WD Mybook 3.0 and getting a expresscard USB 3.0 adapter. There are many options and some will fit your needs better than others, and also your budget. Sorry I'm not more specific but many of these products are subjective to which country you're in, and so on. When you want more storage for backing up or for your work then consider these options and do a bit of research on these companies, lastly when the time comes you can just ask on the forums and I'm sure you'll get great recommendations no matter the route you take!

There's my mini novel too .