Thinking about RAIDing my m17x R2, opinions wanted..

I ordered my R2 to come in RAID 0, and just like many others here, it didn't. Honestly having two separate drives on my computer is annoying, as it forces me to decide where to put certain things and it makes my computer feel disorganized. I also know there's a slight performance boost by raiding your harddrives.

Is it worth it to do at this point? Should I wait for whatever fixes come to the 920XM R2 before doing it? I know it means I have to reinstall everything, but do you guys think it's worth it?

 

I did it as soon i got my m17x. my hds were not raided either

 

LOL, i know how you feel.
That's the price you pay for being a perfectionist

As for the RAID, i personally ordered the non raided config because the Raid is extra 50 bucks i think and since i am going to reinstall windows anyway i saw no reason to have it pre-raided.
But i am totally going to RAID-0 the out of it for the mentioned reason and for the extra performance gain (as little as it is).
The downside of course is the reliability of your hard drives (one fails all fails) and this is why i have a NAS where i backup all my important info and have a backup process running once everyday to keep the backup up to date.
So in case of failure i don't use anything i can't recover.

 

I'd just keep them separate. Use one for storage and the other for OS/games. I use an SSD for my R2 as the primary and the 500 GB as the secondary.

 

where do you keep your page file Joker ?
It is usually recommended to keep the games and the page file separated.

 

I ordered a raid 0 HDD configuration as well, I hope my system comes raided. Otherwise im going to have to do it myself.

 

I did the same as Joker for both my M17X as well as my Inspiron 1720. Will do the same with my M17X R2.

I use my faster HDD, as the primary. So it holds all my games, programs, and my O/S is installed on it. I put all my music, videos and documents in the secondary. Then in the start menu, I just change the links so that they are shortcuts to the respective folders on the secondary. My secondary HDD is set up just as the User folder. With a Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos folder ect. So I dont have to dig for things. You can also replace the folders in your user folder on your primary HDD with short cuts to the folders on your secondary. Then it makes it easier to back up my secondary since all I have to do is copy and paste. To me it's effective. Keeps it orgainized as well as keeping my primary with the O/S clutter free. I just need to get an SSD for the O/S.

This way I have my valuable stuff seperate from the O/S in the event that I get a virus, I'm in hopes that it doesn't spill over to the secondary.

 

That's an awesome setup for a SSD + HDD.
Another benefit is that reinstalling windows is a breeze since all your data is on another disk.
I still think that for those of us that don't have SSD's yet raid is a very nice option.

 

I actually REALLY like this idea. How do you change the start menu links?

Also, in thinking about it I most likely at some point will get an SSD for use as the primary OS, so I suppose RAID is out.

 

If it helps, I had a thread some time ago asking people how they setup their HDDs. I don't do Raid setups. Separate is better, and to me it makes my PC feel more organized.

Have a look:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=411701

 

You have two options. One is to simply right click the "Pictures" button in the start menu on the right, then click location and edit the location to become E:\Pictures, But when I did this it I think it doubles the pictures folders in the User folder for some reason. I didn't play with it much.

But more importantly I simply put a Short cut to "File Storage" in the start menu. It's in the top left column. You can also right click on the left side of the start menu and click properties, then under the start menu tab click customize, then select the "Don't display this item" Which I do. And then on the top left column, I add short cuts to the folders I need.

Now when a folder is open, the links on the left, Pictures, Documents ect, those you can simply change the location by right clicking and editing the location to E:\Pictures, E:\Documents, ect.

The way I have me E:\ orgainized is just the same as I had the C:\Users\Daniel\ Folder orgainized. I copied all the folders, pasted them into E:\ and just linked them and made shortcuts for easy access.

I hope I explained it clearly.

 

Thanks a lot man, good looks.

Can't wait to mess around with this when I get home. Again, that's such a good idea, essentially having the second drive become the User folder.

 

Exactly. It's like having partitions on your HDD, but your second partition IS another HDD. Plus if one HDD dies, your not totally screwed. But again, just make sure you back up everything on your storage drive. I do it every few weeks. Cuz ya just never know Eventually something is going to fail

 

in my hmm 10 years of owning a computer i have had only one HDD fail on me and that was back in like 1997 on my old powermac. Unless your a big tweaker then i wouldnt get to paranoid about anything failing unless its faulty to begin with.

 

Cuz in reality your going to replace the whole thing before age actually affects its performance

 

I just use my SSD. Raid is yucky and complicated (that feeling of being disorganized I can agree with) in laptops from my experience. If you can't store your music, pictures and games on a 128gb or 256gb SSD, you've got a lot of crap and need to clean house.

If you have a lot of movies or data that is just taking up hundreds of GB of space, you need a home server. I recommend the HP Mediasmart - I've had it for 3 months now and it works flawlessly: got two 1TB drivers in there that are mirrored for redundancy and 2 more bays that I plan on installing two more 2TB drives into when I run out of space. You're only getting 3TB of storage out of 6TB of hard drives, but the security of redundancy is a beautiful thing.

Using raid in a laptop for redundancy seems fairly pointless to me. Your data is at risk simply by being in a portable computer. Its better to have it in a server. You should always be prepared, at any time, to lose all of the data on a laptop. If you're using raid for performance, why not just get a SSD? You're spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that you can't dish out an extra 200 and get a high performance solid state disk for? Educational discounts, haggling... there's no reason why you can't get an amazing deal.

 

Why not get 2 SSD and raid them 0 and have the best of both words assuming performance over money.

 

Why not just get 2X SSD in raid 0 and have the best of both assuming performance over money.

 

Keep them seperate.

That way when you format and reinstall you don't have to reinstall games

 

With that idea is there any way to move the games in Steam without reinstalling to the new location? Like a config file or registry entry you can update?

Guess I could just re-install Steam then copy the SteamApps foldder.

 

Yes, that is what you should do.