does my laptop support RAID

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kdfresh09

New Member
hello all. i am in need of a new hard drive since the one in my laptop is having a read error in 1 block. the laptop is a HP Pavilion dv7-1020us. P/N is :ff214ua#aba, and S/N is: cnd8433046.

when i took the hard drive out of the laptop, it has 2 hard drive bays marked drive 1 and drive 2. im needing to know if it will support raid0. ive looked for hours and havnt come up with anything other than the manual says it supports a maximum drive capacity of 640GB (320gig drive @ 5400rpm x 2). can any please help me figure this out?
 
Look in the bios to see if you can change the sata controller to raid. If you can, then it supports raid. If not, then no it doesn't support raid.
 
yeah, ive looked, and i dont see any option to change any setting for the controler....i put in a 160gig drive just to get me over till i get the new drives, and even with that in there, i dont see any option for the controler, nor do i see any info at all about the hard drive...nothing, except choosing the boot device, which says hard drive. all i can do with that is move it up and down on the boot priority list, but it just says hard drive....no info or anything....im confused then cause when hp's manualy says (640GB max= 2 x 320GB drives)...what does that mean....that it will be showing as 1 x 640GB drive in windows if i use 2 x 320GB drives? or...? im also wondering if 2 drives HAVE to be in the computer plugged in in order for diffrent options to become availabe?....
 
Well, I have a feeling it will support drives bigger than 320 gb. It came installed with Vista so I'm assuming it would hold drives as big as 750gb or more. It probably just gave you 640 gb because there are 2 bays and a 320 gb drive came installed in one.
 
most devices that support raid will have a screen to push ctrl+I after post screen to enter the raid controller. I would also look into the raid setup. Running raid 0 is a very bad idea for unless you have another back up of your data. You cannot rebuild a bad drive and you cannot retrieve data from drive 1 if drive 2 breaks and vice versa. I would either use raid 1 or raid 5 unless you are specifically doing it for high performance and have another back up.
 
yeah i know about the risks of raid 0....ive been running them on my desktops for a long time, and have yet to have a problem. i do have a 1 tb external that will be for back ups through acronis, and the raid will be for the os, games and programs, so there is really no risk other than having to reinstall everything if a drive should fail...thats even if the laptop will support raid...ill try the cntrl+i and see what hapens....any other suggestions sould be great, or info that i should read about the laptop i have in regaurds to raid would be great
 
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