Can I make two hard drives of it

W

Welsh Git

New Member
I bought a Dell desktop computer three weeks ago.
The hard drive is 1TB (2x500GB) Serial ATA Raid 0 Stripe (7200RPM) Dual HDD.

That is how it's worded on my recite slip. I bought it thinking it was two separate drives, with a drive icon for each drive, I now know different.

I have not taken the side off yet, not much use yet, as I am not use to Sata drives.
Looking at the booklet I received with it, under raid support it says
Raid o Striping
Raid 1 Mirroring.

It looks as If I have a few PCI slots. Is it possible for me to pull out the sata connectors as they are connected now and plug them into two separate sata connectors, so I have two hard drives.
Thanks Ralph.
 
It is but at the same time it is not. If you break the array you need to reinstall everything (windows, software, drivers, everything). Your motherboard controller supports JBOD arrays as well but again if you want to break the array backup anything you need and make sure you have a windows CD to reinstall from.
 
Thanks Cromewell.

I had a look in my bios. Am I right in thinking that if I disable Raid in the bios and select ATA instead, I would then have two separate drives, that I can install the operating system on one and use the other for storage.

Thanks.
 
I had a look in my bios. Am I right in thinking that if I disable Raid in the bios and select ATA instead, I would then have two separate drives, that I can install the operating system on one and use the other for storage.
Click to expand...
Yes. You will need to repartition and format the drives.
 
Well I had a go to make my two drives separate, changed from raid to ATA in bios

When it came time to pick a drive to install to in setup, it said no suitable drive to install windows to. And yet the one drive was there at the correct size, only one, in the bios I could see two. I have reinstalled now back to raid.

All that work for nought.

Thanks Ralph.
 
It's possible that you need SATA drivers to install windows I thought that this was restricted to older motherboards with added SATA controllers though. Although it's possible your drives are plugged into an addin controller on the motherboard and that's why XP could not find any drives.
 
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