Running RAID on a laptop?

[holyford86]

windows dynamic disks?

I just installed a second 500gb drive in my laptop and now I'm thinking about doing this, Upsides? Downsides?

it's a HP DV9008nr, I'm running XP Media Center, 4GB of ram, 500GB drives

 

[rtg143]

This should help you decide. http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/l/aaRAIDPage1.htm

 

[mjonesjr]

You have a laptop large enough to hold 2 hard drives? Holy cow that thing must be huge.

If you are running 2 identical drives, it is good to run RAID1. RAID1 mirrors the 2 hard drives and makes them essentially 1 hard drive. If 1 fails, then you do not lose any info because the other is an exact mirror of the one that failed. Redundancy is key in computing.

 

[holyford86]

You have a laptop large enough to hold 2 hard drives? Holy cow that thing must be huge.

If you are running 2 identical drives, it is good to run RAID1. RAID1 mirrors the 2 hard drives and makes them essentially 1 hard drive. If 1 fails, then you do not lose any info because the other is an exact mirror of the one that failed. Redundancy is key in computing.

it's not too bad, it's a 17" wide screen HP DV9008NR , I bought it for $100 because the display was trashed but it worked fine otherwise(other than being completely loaded with viruses). I was going to flip it and try to make a little bit on it but then I discovered that it held 2 HDD drives and I decided to keep it. It's got an AMD turion64 processor running 1.6 Ghz, 4GB ddr2 5300 ram (only recognizes 2.6GB ),2 500GB Western Digital SATA drives, Windows XP Media center (professional in disguise), It's a few years old but it's quick enough for what I do with it, I just upgraded the secondary to match the primary drive a few days ago, I was running the factory 100GB drive as a secondary but it quickly filled... I think I'm going to pick up an external enclosure for it.

 

[Scotty J.]

The only RAID you would be able to run is RAID 1, that is basically a mirror. If the primary fails, it will fall over to the secondary seamlessly.

Pros, you will not lose any data and it's not a bad "High Availability" option for a Laptop.

Cons, you're using 1TB on a 500MB machine. If it were ME, I would buy an inexpensive external drive to do periodic backups (in fact, that IS what I do). And use the entire 1TB for storage.

RAID REALLY benefits you with file servers running RAID 5, that way you can have drive failures with automatic fail over spares. Expensive, but worth it for "High Availability" file servers.