Adding 2nd drive for FS9

[stevehookem]

If I add a 2nd Velociraptor JUST for the FS 9 program, can I keep all my add-ons where they are now on the start-up Velociraptor?

Will I see any benefit to doing this? The program will run on it's own drive, the add-ons would be on the other drive with Windows XP.

Thoughts?

[congo]

Image the current drive and save the image to a third drive,
say a 1tb internal backup or an external usb storage drive.

Build a raid 0 out of the two raptors, then restore the saved
image on the raid array.

Image the RAID 0 array weekly or whenever you want a
backup made and save the image to your backup drive, so if
the array dies, you'll still have almost everything, except
what you lost since you did the last image.

The advantages are twofold,
1. You get a doublespeed, double capacity system and gaming partition.
2. You are forced into a backup regime (if you do not already have a backup system)

The warnings are that raid 0 is unstable and unsafe because if one drive fails, the array and data on it are lost.

Personally I'm raiding for a few years without failure, I upgrade my drives every couple of years as well, and this may be an advantage, though a HDD can fail anytime.

Note:
You will possibly need to install the raid drivers to the OS before you image the drive, so that when you attempt to boot the OS from the restored image on the new raid array, the OS recognises the raid partition.

[stevehookem]

what do I use to image the drive?

[congo]

If you can lay your hands on Disk Wizard, from Seagate, that contains a free imaging program, however, (the last time I downloaded it) it will only image Seagate drives, but..... there is a workaround.

The program allows you to make a boot disk with Disk Wizard on it, so make a CDROM boot disk while running Disk Wizard, then use that disk to boot from. Disk Wizard then allows you to image any drive

Your backup destination must be large enough to hold the compressed image of your hard disk.

The HDD/partition you restore the image to needs to be large enough to hold the uncompressed image, I'm not sure if the destination partition needs to be at least the same size as the source partition or not, simply cannot recall atm.

Disk Wizard was written by Acronis Backup as far as I can tell, which is payware.

If you can't locate the program anywhere, I have an old copy I may be able to upload. Mind you, you may find some other easy to use freeware program.

[congo]

It's arguably better to leave the entire Raid 0 array as one single partition, as far as performance goes. Use folders instead of partitions.

Plan the array to be half filled only so you are using the fastest part of the disks.

No partition seeking, fast half of disk, 2x velociraptors in Raid 0, all adds up to a nice fast partition in theory

If you were running a 32bit XP, you could further speed the array with some OS tweaking so it handles large formatted cluster sizes, but I don't think this works on x64 OS's.

A cool thing to have is a fresh image of a newly installed OS, complete with it's drivers installed and basic software and security regime. This can save a lot of time if you ever want to re-install an OS, also, a small pure OS image can be made in minutes, and restored to a hdd in minutes.

[congo]

A note on Imaging drives, Windows has tools built into it that do such a thing, though I've never learned to use them, nor do I know how the images are maintained.

Disk Wizard will provide a clean image you can restore to any suitable HDD, all you need is the Disk Wizard CDROM boot disk.

The CDROM boot disk provides a real bonus if you are thinking it looks awkward. When an OS is running, it locks files and it doesn't want to image properly, there may be programs that get around this, but a pure image of an OS that's NOT running is RELIABLE. The Disk Wizard boot disk loads a mini OS so you can image the OS drive in it's pure state, while it's dormant.

If you build an onboard solution Raid 0 array, use the max stripe size, which is 128k usually, if you build an array using a dedicated RAID card, you may want to read the instructions

If you use onboard RAID and you have 2 seperate raid controllers, perhaps use the fastest controller if you can determine what that is. I'm not sure, but some intel based boards have onboard raid in the chipset, and they also have a Jmicron raid controller or some other brand of third party raid support. It's likely all much of a muchness, but it bears investigation if you have a choice of controller to use.

Raid can sound a bit daunting to start with, but once you've set it up, you realise it's no big deal at all, and it's transparent, acting like a normal drive, but bigger and faster!

Once you know how, you can set a raid array in a couple of minutes.

SSD drives will hopefully soon render all my "knowledge" of such things as useless, but until they get realistic.....


PS. I just edited all my posts, where I had said "Seatools" before, I changed it to "Disk Wizard" which is more accurate, very sorry if you got lost out there, my bad.