Need Help With RAID-0 Configuration (HP DV9548US)

I have a HP Pavilion Notebook model DV9548US. It has two internal hard drives. The controller is an Intel ICH8. It is my understanding it can do a raid array. I only have the 32bit Vista Home Prem that came with the machine and running a recovery does not give raid install options. How would I get the machine to recognize the drives as a raid array? I am also thinking about purchasing a 500GB Western Digital MyBook USB drive. Any Comments?

 

you can only set up a raid array, if your laptop supports it.
When the system boots, do you see any screen which says raid manager?
If you have a raid controller, either hardware or software, you will see the manager everytime the system boots. It will check your harddrives for health.
If you bios takes like 35 seconds to boot you have raid support, if you dont see anything like this, than your laptop doesnt support raid.
Look into the Bios to see if you can enable and SATA Raid features their. If there are none, you are out of luck.
But dont worry you will not get much from Raid 0, since almost every laptop which supports raid uses a software based raid controller, which means at most a 5-7% increase in harddrive speed.
Its really not worth it to go for Raid 0, cause no hp has ever had a hardware based raid controller.

K-TRON

 

Pavilions dont support RAID.

You need the Intel ICH8-R chipset.

 

Thanks for your replies. I was also considering an upgrade on the ram. HP tells me the computer will only do 2GB. It has 2 slots of DDR2 PC-5300. I find ram for this up to 4GB. Vista Home Prem 32bit says it will register 4GB. Do you think this would be a waste of money? I know other means of upgrade would be processor replacement. Or go to 64bit software environment. The mother board does not support this. How or where do I find compatble motherboards and where do I find the socket type for this PC?

 

Your notebook shows up with the PM965 chipset, so I don't see why it would not physically support 4GB RAM (maybe a BIOS limitation).
You can try out 2x2GB PC2-5300 and see if it gets detected in the BIOS or not (Not sure if it'll work !!). To address the full 4GB, you'll need a 64-Bit OS. Vista 32-Bit will address ~3GB out of the 4GB installed.
And you can upgrade to any of the 1st Gen Penryns (T8100, T8300, T9300 and T9500). These are Socket P CPUs. Check out this CPU Guide.

 

I understand that athough it addresses 3GB, the system still uses the other 1GB Ram. It is just not available to windows? Do you have any comment on this? This may possibly help my dedicated ram alottment to my nVidia graphics card. The manual says 1GB alotted for 4GB installed which would allow Vista 1GB and user apps 2GB that's not too bad. Also I have seen some tricks on MS website about 4GT and some other ram managing features. Any comments on these techniques?

 

Don't try any of that stuff. If you want to use the full 4GB, upgrade to 64-Bit.

In short, the unaddressed RAM won't, and cannot be utilised by Windows 32-Bit in any possible way, as it does not see it.

If you cannot upgrade to 64-Bit, upgrade to 3GB RAM.