ENVY 17 3D SB Replacing 5400 RPM HD with 7200 RPM

I am waiting on my new ENVY 17 3D configured with 2 x 750 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drives. I'm not interested in SSD until prices come down/size goes up. I want to add at least 1 7200RPM 750GB HD (WD Black Scorpio). I realize that I will have to save the original drive/s for possible warranty work. I don't know much about RAID so several questions arise:

1. Should I replace both 5400 RPM hard drives with 7200's or just #1 with the operating system and keep the 5400 in the #2 slot?

2. What RAID configuration does this SB ENVY ship with, i.e. does it write to both drives or just #1 with the operating system on it?

*The reason for question 2 is I don't want to be writing to a 5400 & 7200 hard drive at the same time.

3. I assume that i will just format, partition and load the $19 system recovery disk after hard drive swap to return to factory delivery condition after the swap?

Thanks in advance for any input...

 

I'm pretty positive if you order the 2x750gig it comes in Raid 0, which is where it writes/reads to both drives simultaneously. If you replace one with a 7200rpm drive and reinstall, it should break the raid, and the computer will just see 2 separate drives.

Replacing 1 or 2 drives. If you replace both drives, you can then Raid the 7200's for a performance boost. However, I would personally recommend just getting a SSD, you'll end up spending about the same amount (2xWD Scorpio v. 1x128G-160G SSD), and the SSD will far surpass the raid in performance. The only downside is storage space, instead of 1.5TB, you'll have like 850GB.

 

I appreciate the advice. So when I install the 7200 RPM it will either configure automatically to 2 separate drives. If not, do I just go into BIOS to change RAID set up and what RAID setup is the number for two drives to operate independently, RAID1?

 

I'm not 100% sure how the bios works, I haven't gotten my envy yet to tell ya exactly how to do it, but usually if you don't want to raid, there should be an option to just turn it off, then the laptop will see the disks as individual disks.

Just as an FYI - Raid 1 is actually drive mirroring; basically, the computer only uses 1 drive, and makes a duplicate copy of it on the other drive. You can also do Raid 10, which requires 4 drives, 2 are striped like raid 0, and the other two mirror those like raid 1. There's also raid 5, which uses 3 drives, and somehow stripes em and keeps a backup copy of the drive on itself as well, but I'm not exactly sure how that works.

 

Thanks trucha.

 

To access the RAID BIOS, you go into the laptop bios and enable the RAID BIOS. Then on boot it will ask you to hit a key combination to enter the RAID BIOS where you can delete your current RAID configuration. Once done, turn the RAID BIOS off in the main BIOS and it will boot a little faster. If you order the 2x 750GB drive combo, it should come RAID0 striped.

 

Thank you. Appreciate it!

 

cam121 +1.

KJ

 

Thank you. Appreciate it!

 

RAID0 striped means it does write equally to both drives, correct?

 

Raid0 has no fault tolerance. It writes different parts of a file to different drives, splitting it up into a bunch of small parts

 

So in your opinion.... if I do NOT want an SSD (too expensive and not large enough yet - rather have storage than speed but 5400 too slow) would you buy 2 x 7200 Rpm drives and keep it set up with the same Raid config or just buy 1 and leave the 5400 in slot 2 and set up Raid to write to the 7200 only....that is my specific dilemma...

 

It doesn't write the same data to both drives, but the data is split equally across both drives, yes. you take advantage of the total amount of space available on both drives (assuming they are identical), but the theoretical advantage lies in the fact that data can stream from both drives at the same time, increasing the burst xfer rate. The disadvantage is that HDD reliability is now lower, because a failure of one drive means failure of the entire HDD system.

 

I wouldn't use RAID0 for disimilar drives. Remember that RAID0 splits the data acrosss two drives (that is, for some file, 'mymovie.wmv', roughly half of it will reside on disk1 and the other half on disk2), so its not possible to set up Raid to write to the 7200 only. Here are your options as I see them:

1. buy one 7200 drive and use it as the primary (OS) drive. leave the 5400 in there for data storage for which you don't require the speed of a 7200. This is the least expensive option, and more reliable than the shipped (RAID 0)configuration but (interestingly enough) a little more messy in terms of preserving the original "shipped" configuration in case you need to send the laptop back to hp.

2. buy two 7200 drives and keep them separate (no raid). This improves upon the read/write performance of your data disk in (1) above, but the improvement might not be that noticable or worth the cost, depending on what you store of course. For example, portions of very large games can be stored on the secondary (no RAID) drive. keeping the two drives separate is more reliable. Another advantage is that it preserves the shipped configuration so you can easily restore it later if you need to.

3. Buy two 7200 drives and stripe them RAID 0. This gives you even higher read/write performance, and lower reliability. The system "sees" only one drive (the striped combination of both drives).

In my view, the choice to RAID or not is a trade-off between performance and reliabiltiy. It seems to me that if you are comitted to buying a pair of 7200s I think I would stripe them. A pair of striped 7200 rpm drives in RAID 0 would scream, I would think, depending on the nature of the data you are storing and how important read performance is. But it would also be less reliable because a failure of one drive takes the whole machine down. But -- in your situation (since you already have two 5400 drives to fall back on), and if you back-up frequently enough, all you'd have to do is put the 5400s back in until you could replace the faulty 7200.

 

Unless you absolutely need more than 750 GB of space, I think the best option would be to buy a small SSD, use that as your boot/OS drive and put in the larger 7200 RPM one for data. If you find the right deal, you can score a 60-80 GB SSD for less than $120. IMO, that configuration offers the best balance of speed, space, heat, and power consumption.

 

Ya'll ROCK. Thank you for concise, detailed advice I find only on this forum!

 

/strongly agree

In theory a good RAID bios won't even let you do this, but with corners some manufacturers cut, I've seen worse.

In my mind, there is no choice b/c raid0 > separate similar disks. In both cases and for all practical purposes, you are limited to a failure of a single drive. Why not get the performance benefit of a striped array considering over the life of the laptop you'll spend more time working on it than recovering from a HDD failure?

- If you have your HDD's striped, after a failure of one drive, you lose your OS and data. Your OS is easy to get back assuming you have a restore DVD. Your data needs a separate backup process.

- If you have your HDD's separate, your machine still suffers a drastic impact of a single failure. If you lose your OS drive, you buy a new HDD and restore from DVD. If you lose your data drive, you buy a new HDD and revert from a previous backup.​

In either case, you lose something of value enough to make the pc almost useless; after-all, how good is your laptop if your OS drive survives but all your data is gone? Also, if you lose one drive and you need to be back up and running quickly, you can easily revert to a single drive config using your restore DVD + data backups regardless if you started with a striped array or not.

Basically, if it were me and SSD were NOT an option, I would RAID0 stripe two similar HDD's. For best performance, you'll want a SSD though.

 

re: RAID 0 on disimilar drives: lol its funny to see that HP by mistake has shipped the "160+640" configuration in striped form, which they don't even support!

There is a corner case that advantages the separate drives configuration -- It depends on what you store on the data drive, how often you access it and how important it is to be there. For example, if you have movies and photos on the data drive, and all the apps are installed on the primary drive, then you can "work" without the entertainment content, without doing any restore work, and you haven't lost anythign of urgent value. if HDD failure occurs and the coin comes up heads (data drive fails ) then you can keep working with hardly an interruption. Morever, if your entertainment content is backed up, then you can still work and play both.

But you're right to point out that many put "data" on the secondary drive in a way that makes failure of this drive tanamount to catestrophic failure of the whole system. It takes a careful needs analysis and configuration work to accomplish a totally separate data drive, but when this is possible, it makes the "separate drives" option something to consider.

And the probability thing is important to recognize as well. I have two 5400 rpm drives right now on my 5-year old dv8000t, with a "totally separate data drive". I carry a portable HDD when I travel and back up everthing, so that if my data drive were to fail, I could easily live with the inconvinience until I found another drive. If my primary drive failed, I have optical restore disks. But in five years I haven't experienced any HDD failure, and I've never had to restore the OS or the data from a backup!

 

True, but like I said, the restore of an OS drive is relatively simple and within a couple of hours you would have a working system on a single drive config after recovering from a stripe failure. But as you mentioned, the chances of a HDD failure are minimal. Thus, if you are going to experience one drive failure in a 5 year timeframe, wouldn't you rather enjoy the performance benefit of a stripe over that 5-year period rather than dealing with a slow computer and hoping that the failure takes your least used data drive?

 

well in my case the decision was to keep separate drives, because I can totally separate my data and reduce the chances of failure impacting my work when I travel, and avoid the OS install. performance is "good enough", for this particular machine and for what I use it for, which is CPU/RAM bound and not disk I/O bound. So there is no advantage to the stripe in my particular case. But -- if I had a twin-HDD Envy 17 3D I'd stripe it, without a doubt

 

I don't have any info to reinforce or refute RAID 0 on a laptop...but I do have some data to show on a desktop. I have an X58 motherboard with TWO Western Digital Velociraptors in RAID 0. I have been running them this way for at least One and one half years. No failure, no data loss. Mind you...Velociraptors are Enterprise class drives...made for this...but here are the graphs to show performance. I do a lot of video encoding, etc...so in combination of the i7 950 CPU, Nvidia GTX 580 and the two drives...my machine eats up and encodes video very fast!!! I am not as negative about RAID 0 as some others may be. I also have two Seagate 160 GB drives in RAID 0 on my Wife's machine...running for over three years with no losses to date...

 

video work is a no brainer, to be sure, and a prime example of work that is disk I/O bound. In fact, the reason why I personally would stripe an Envy 17 is precisely because this platform is so I/O capable compared to the one I have now. Especially a pair of 7200s (not available from HP of course...) would scream, imho, and the prefered option for Steel43 GIVEN his constraint to avoid the SSD. otherwise, the best option is an SSD plus a 7200.

 

Is there a step by step process manual to do the RAID 0, have never done it before. My original config is 1 To 5200 and would like to change to 2x 750 GB7200s. Thanks in advance.

 

If you have the 1TB 5200 HDD, you will have to get a caddy for the second drive first. You can get it here, nice quality and fast shipping (I got mine here as well):
Hard Drive Caddy & Cable for HP Envy 17 (also works with SSD) [HP-ENVY-17] - $38.55 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks
Now if you want Raid 0, you will have to change the setting in the bios on the first boot.
Once you are done there, the best thing would be to do a clean install of Win 7. There are some really goog tips in the Envy17 SB 2xxxx forum about clean install and required drivers and sequences of how to install them. You can also try to do an install from your recovery DVDs, but there is some issues about this as well, since they are based on a different HDD configuration. Bobmitch wrote a great guide as how to fix it though (again, to be found in the 2xxx forum).
Hope that helps a bit.

 

I have the caddy and 1x 7200 RPM, waiting for the second one to arrive. Did tried to reinstall on one 750 GB 7200 RPM using the recovery disc without success. It asked for the boot disc. I re-enter the 1st recovery disc, still not working. My question is the term from Bobmitch for installing a SSD "I put my first recovery disk in and ejected it at the windows logo which led to windows recovery which I skipped to get to a command prompt - entering BootRec/FixBoot and BootRec/FixMbr", does it also apply to HDD. As I don't have the Windows 7 DVD to do a fresh install.

 

Also: interested to see how 2 x 7200 works for you guys, as it appears that this is a configuration that HP has qualified. I'm sure it will work; I'm just curious about power consumption and heat, presuming that it takes more power to spin at 7200 instead of 5400.

 

Yes, it doesn't matter if you are using SSD's or HDD's; recovery is the same.

 

Just wanted to say thank you for everyone here, I made it. Just a slight different from the guide stated.