Adding a second HD (P-6831FX)

Hello everyone, I have a few questions about adding a second drive to my P-6831FX. I have no experience with upgrading laptops so bare with me if my questions sound stupid.

First of all when my second drive arrives from Newegg what do I need to do so that I can just use it as a data drive? I've heard a lot of people talking about running two identical drives in RAID, but I have no idea what RAID is and how to set it up, would anyone care to help me out with that? If RAID isn't worth my time or whatever, then I just need to know what I need to do to make both drives work together, so I will have 500GB total space (2x250GB drives).

Will I need to reformat the drive currently in the laptop?

Sorry if I didn't give enough information, I'm just really confused, so if you need me to explain anything just ask.

 

just turn off the laptop, remove the battery (some say press the power button for 3 sec - voodoo ?)
unscrew the plastic above the hard drive slots.
from there its all straight forward use the manual that came with laptop.
close all up, put battery back and fire it on, you might want to go into the bios to make sure the new drive is being recognized, but i am almost sure that it wont be necessary.

next step is to format your NEW drive, no need to format old one if you don't plan on using raid0.
probably vista will prompt to do that, if not right click computer/manage/storage/disk management/
chose your new drive (probably disk 1) right click and format it.


more on raid : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

 

Alright perfect, so all I need to do is pop the second drive in and format it? I've heard that while RAID provides a performance boost, you can lose all your data if one drive fails, in light of that is the performance increase really that noticeable?

 

well that depends on your usage.

read : http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

 

Thank you for your help royk50, I think for now I'll just use the two drives without RAID and see how that goes. In the future I may try out RAID, but it doesn't seem necessary for me to have right now.

 

The hold down button bit is for the laptop to drain itself of power. Don't know how true that is, but doesn't hurt.

 

I'm doing the same..really happy to have the extra space over previous notebook.

Enjoy your new notebook!