Switch to Raid later?

[rylan]

Ok, so I'm building a new PC. I've got a 120GB SATA hard drive, and going to use WinXP Pro. If I do a normal install, can I add another drive and enable Raid1 (mirror, not striping) at a later point, or will windows get all pissed off at that?

To make things more complicated, I'm considering using FAT32 to do a dual boot XP and 98SE (since I have some games and emulators and stuff that won't run on XP.. need the old real dos command prompt).

[Technoid]

Yes, you can add mirroring afterwards
no, filesystem do not make the slightest diffrens to a mirror

[rylan]

Sweet, thanks

[a_h]

If you want to run Dos games in XP, why don't you try the DosBox: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

I'm sure it's a smaller pain than doing reboots and editing config.sys/autoexec.bat to get just more of these 640KB...

[Fred H]

Ok, I too, plan to build a new PC, and I don’t know so much about SATA, except that they are fast as h**l.
Can I start/boot in DOS, with a Win98 start diskette and access a SATA drive (no Raid), or install/repair/handle WinXP on the SATA?
Does a SATA drive work as a primary (C: ) drive to boot from? Can you split a SATA in 2 or more partitions?
Or, better to connect the SATA (only one) e.g. as video capture drive and boot from an IDE 100 HD?

Fred H

[Kurt]

SATA drives are as fast as their ATA counterpart. Not more, not less.

The actual SATA implementation is still wet behind the ears. For best performance, look for a full SATA drive (ie without an ATA-SATA converter onboard) and a full SATA chipset (also without the converters).

The drive won't be faster but the data will be available faster...not that you should notice it...

[Dilitante1]

If XP is fully like Win2k the boot drive cant be mirrored/dynamic as the mirroring is an intergral part of the OS
NT could but 2K cant afaik

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Fred H
Ok, I too, plan to build a new PC, and I don’t know so much about SATA, except that they are fast as h**l.
Can I start/boot in DOS, with a Win98 start diskette and access a SATA drive (no Raid), or install/repair/handle WinXP on the SATA?

yes, (but as usual w98 cant read ntfs without 3rd party tools )

Does a SATA drive work as a primary (C: ) drive to boot from? Can you split a SATA in 2 or more partitions?

yes, yes

Or, better to connect the SATA (only one) e.g. as video capture drive and boot from an IDE 100 HD?

yes

Fred H

apart from the connectors, there is not much that differs between PATA and SATA......

[agallag]

Originally posted by Dilitante1
If XP is fully like Win2k the boot drive cant be mirrored/dynamic as the mirroring is an intergral part of the OS
NT could but 2K cant afaik

I think they're talking about using hardware based RAID. In that case, windows doesn't even know it's running on mirrored drives, it just sees the one logical disk.

If they're talking about the built in mirroring capability of Windows, then no, you can't use that on your system/boot drive.

[rylan]

Yup, talking abouty hardware raid... planning on using the built in raid on my motherboard. Just have to decide weather to use the embedded raid in the southbridge or the external SiliconImage raid controler chip.

[Byock]

SATA has no real world speed difference. In several of the benchmarks I have read, it was slightly slower. Of course you would only notice on a benchmark...