Sager NP8760 - RAID Question

Hi
I had a question regarding the available RAID option in the NP8760.

If I purchase a NP8760 right now with just one drive, can I setup RAID 0 or 1 later by adding a second drive myself?

Or the RAID setup is locked once the laptop is shipped and it cannot be changed after that.


Regards

 

Yes. In fact this is what I plan on doing. I have a 320GB 7200 now, and I'll be ordering the W870CU with a 320GB 7200, and I'm going to have it running RAID 0.

You do not need to have the same size drives for RAID 0, but you will only get twice the space of the smallest drive. They do not have to be the same speed drives or same model, but it is recommended. You're going to lose any performance benefit you might gain from RAID 0 if you mix drive speeds.

 

Just remember that when you decide to implement RAID on hard drives, it wipes the data clean. I suggest if possible that you first make a clone of your hard drive on an external unit of some kind before doing the raid function, then implant your clone back onto your machine.

Something tells me you'll need an external floppy drive and a copy of norton's Ghost (unless you can do a bootable USB drive) to do it, but I may be wrong.

 

Old school man! I used Ghost all the time when I made NT4 / Windows 2000 images for a living a few jobs ago. As far as the floppy, you'll need some way of installing the RAID drivers for XP, but Windows 7 should handle it fine. I'll be installing both, but I'm going to slipstream the drivers into the XP DVD.

Ghost is still a good utility, but currently I'm digging ShadowProtect for my imaging uses. Love the hot image feature, which sounds like it's pretty prevalent in most recently released imaging utilities.

 

Lol I'm only 20 but the last job I had my boss showed me all kinds of stuff, I had to use ghost myself to replant an image onto a machine earlier THIS year lol. He also showed me a lil command prompt stuff too, but I don't remember it all (sad face) lol. But I'll have to look into shadowprotect, because getting external floppies for me is a gigantic NOOOO hehe.

I use Vista still as no matter how good people tell me windows 7 is, I keep finding little bugs with it that a good amount of people using Win 7 probably wouldn't realize, but in my opinion I'm going to wait till SP1 comes out at least before I consider it an upgrade. I think XP is inferior to both 7 and Vista though, and I don't use it XD.
But hey whatever floats your boat is cool with me, as long as you're good to fix any problems that can occur I can't put ya down. I do want to look into cloning images though, it would be useful for life as a computer technician ^^

 

Indeed. The hot image feature allows for imaging the PC while Windows is running, pretty neat actually. Used to be a big pain.. You had to get a bootable floppy disk that had hardware specific nic drivers, connect to the network under DOS so you could image to a network location, and then do it all again to bring that image down on another PC.

I used to manage images for 30+ different hardware configurations for a company with over 60,000+ people. PITA.

Today you can image while windows is running, directly to a USB drive, boot up with a CD and pull the image back. So much easier. Not to mention the "real" imaging environments with Altiris deployment server, etc..

 

what cd should I boot with to pull the image back? I'll mostly be working with XP and win 7 users, but whatever applies for 7 should also work for vista I think.

 

Normally whatever software you choose to do the imaging will allow you to create a boot cd. You obviously need the software on the boot CD to restore the image that was created in the first place, so there should be an option somewhere in your imaging software to create a bootable CD. Again, I use ShadowProtect, but there are plenty of other imaging applications out there that do the same.

That's a really good question, by the way. You would be surprised at how many people take the time to make a drive image without knowing how they're going to use it.

 

Lol I would say that I know a lot about computers, but when I meet something I don't know, I try to find out all I can, because assuming stuff works is never a good idea. It annoys me that people in high positions calling themselves technicians do really idiotic stuff to computers. (There was a guy finishing my A+ course who told me that processors didn't have nanometers. I was like.... *smack*)

 

I actually will setup my 8760 using a platter HD. After I'm 100% happy with the system I'll defrag (consolidate free space), image the system partition using T.I., replace the platter HD with an SSD, and write the image to the SSD. Saves some minor amount of wear on the drive since I install and tweak for DAYS sometimes and creates the largest contiguous free space on the SSD. How's that?

 

Remember before you do that to wipe the shadow copies. Those things take up something like 50GB+ on my computer. It's a huge free space eater.

 

I'm with you, brother! I have an external 1T eSATA drive that images and restores so fast I can't believe it actually did it! Those Samsung spinpoint 1T drives are really under-rated. I got five from the Egg when I got a 10% off coupon $375 for 5T (!!) Not a problem with one of 'em...

 

I'm with you, brother! I have an external 1T eSATA drive that images and restores so fast I can't believe it actually did it! Those Samsung spinpoint 1T drives are really under-rated. I got five from the Egg when I got a 10% off coupon $375 for 5T (!!) Not a problem with one of 'em...

 

That sounds cool, but I live outside of the US so it's harder for me to get hard drives hehe. Especially for laptops. Anybody wanting to sponsor me a 500GB HDD for this machine is forever welcome to do so ^^

 

Which eSATA drive / enclosure are you using?

 

If someone would be so kind: How do you set up a RAID 0 on the 8760? I've heard it's pretty easy, but any advice (don't worry, if I kill my system, I only have myself to blame hahaha) would be appreciated!