Do you have to format your hard drive when adding a new one and making it raid 0?

hwlin76

New member
I have a 160gb hard drive. I am adding another wd caviar se 160gb hd and i want to change them both into a raid 0 array. Do I have to format my old hard drive and reinstall windows to setup the raid 0? Could i get some instructions on how to do this?
 

Brien

New member
Raid0 is striping data across both drives, you will have to reformat after creating the RAID...Keep in mind, that if you create a RAID0 drive, you have just MORE than doubled the chances that you will, sometime in the future loose ALL the information on your computer.If you loose one drive in a RAID0 configuration, you loose ***ALL*** of the data on both drives. If one drive has a few bad sectors at the right time or gets a little corruption due to a power-outage, you loose ALL the information on BOTH drives...If you have to individual drives, and one gets corrupted, you only loose the data on that 1 drive, at least half of your information is still available... ALSO, should 1 drive get corrupted in a non-RAID0 situation, you have a VERY good chance that a disk check will recover your data intact... This is NOT the case in RAID0... A little corruption can cause you to loose everything, since a disk check will usually NOT resolve problems in a "downed" raid 0.Unless you are simply running programs, and never storing any kind of data on your drives, I would NEVER consider running a system in striped mode. Be warned...(also, there is usually very little performance to be gained by striping in most situations.)
 
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