Replacing 2 hard drives on Dell Raid BIOS Dimension PC

[Ron]

Hi All

 

The title is pretty self explanatory, I have a Dell Dimension 9200 desktop It has two hard drives Linked via a RAID system in the BIOS.

 

I have not heard much about this RAID system over the past few years but it used to be popular on industrial computers with multiple drives. For anybody that has not heard of RAID this system is a process where Two Hard Drives appear as one and the software posts half of any data simultaneously onto the two drives effectively halving access times.Unfortunately mine are now running at 75% usage so I am considering updating the drives but retaining the Raid system as it really speeds up disk access times.

 

I have three questions............

 

- Anybody done this before who can advise me of likely problems.

 

- Dell's recommended substitute is 2 SSD Hard Disks at about 500gb each and about £500 is this worthwhile.

 

- I am a bit out of touch so what would anybody recommend for a twin 500gb non SSD disc setup.

 

I look forward to any advice

 

Ron

[Plastic Nev]

Hi Ron,

My first thoughts are that if substituting with SSD, due to the incredible speeds of access that SSD's have, you can forget the raid set up and clone the system onto just one SSD.

However, if wishing to keep the RAID set up and use two larger conventional mechanical drives, (As yet, SSD drives have a poor reputation) it would mean cloning each existing drive on to the larger replacement. Not being that well up on the RAID configuration I cannot advise how to do that as I haven't a clue, and not that sure how to get a split Raid system onto one SSD. Though I do remember seeing something about that in one of the cloning or image making softwares, which you would need to install in any case to create clones of the original system.

There are plenty of different makes of image or clone creating software to choose from, and quite a few are free.

Hopefully, someone with more RAID knowledge can advise further, my thoughts are just to let you see the various options.

 

Nev.

[Synapse]

It looks like have RAID 0, striped disks if I have it correct?

 

My experience of SSD is that the drive access times are much faster than mechanical drives, and any system I have swapped to SSD has demonstrated an apparent performance hike.

 

Looking at your motherboard, I think you have a P965 Express chipset, so SATA 2 drive interface. Most newer drives will be SATA 3, in theory double the speed of SATA 2. You will not see the full performance gain of new drives.

 

Personally I wouldn´t spend that sort of cash in pursuit of performance on an old machine. A couple of 1 TB mechanical drives would do more or less the same job, give you the capacity you require and for much less money.

 

Alternatively, a single SSD would do the job.

 

I´ve never cloned RAID, if I were to approach it, I would clone my current OS to an external drive as an image, create a bootable CD, fit the new drives, use BIOS to initialise and create the new array, format, and then use the boot CD/ image to rebuild the system to the new drive setup.

 

I would probably use Acronis TrueImage for the task.

[Ron]

Many Thanks to Plastiv Nev and Synaps

 

I think that I will settle for a couple of standard 500GB Mechanical drives the comment about SAT2 and SAT3 was most enlightening.

 

The way I see it some programming inside the BIOS or the Chip Converts and Separates incoming data automatically dividing it across the two disks and the reverse happens with outgoing Data.

I certainly run the system in this fashion and there is no indication of the raid system being in operation.

 

So I suppose the question is if I do a disk copy onto a single external hard drive the raid system should create a single disk of data.

 

If I then install the two bigger hard disks and copy the data back the raid system should just divide and reload the data onto the new disks.

 

This assumes that the raid system is effectively independent of the disks ?????

 

Unless the disks have to be formatted in a specific manner. Regards Ron

Edited October 4, 2013 by Ron

[Synapse]

Hi Ron

 

So I suppose the question is if I do a disk copy onto a single external hard drive the raid system should create a single disk of data.

 

You are correct.

 

The RAID array is setup in BIOS so that when Windows is installed, it only sees one disk. The RAID chip(s) do all of the work.

 

Regarding installing two new hard drives, you will need to fit them in to your computer, then boot up. Some systems have a function key to acess RAID, say F11, some do it through the BIOS setup. Either way you will need to access the RAID menu. From there you will need to add both disks to a RAID array, this tells your hardware setup to use the disks as one RAID disk.

 

Then you can rebuild with your previously saved image. If you need more detailed instructions, specific to your unit, let me know and I will look it up on the Dell website.