Converst SATA to RAID and add drive, possible?

[dbay55]

I have a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP MB (875P chipset) with onboard SATA and IDE RAID. It is set up with a single 74 Gb Raptor in SATA as the boot drive. There are 2 larger IDE drives as IDE RAID 0 (IDE3 in bios).

The SATA drive is loaded with XP, updates and applications, so I would really not like to reformat this drive. For now, it is configured as only SATA through the Intel chipset and redirected to IDE0 Primary through the bios. Is it possible to change the bios to configure this drive as SATA RAID 0 using the single drive without reformatting or loosing the XP boot and apps? Separately, is it then possible to add a second drive in RAID 0 without loosing the software on the original disk?

 

[jurgen36]

Well I have a similar arrangement in one of my machines. You can add another sata drive and then sett it up as raid 1, this will mirror the original drive and you will not loose any files. But remember that you have full redundency but no speed increase and half the total capacity. If you set it up as raid 0 you will have almost twice the speed and twice the capacity but no redundency at all. My system uses 4 sata 150 drives in a raid 0+1 configuration this gives me the speed increase and full redundency. I use the 4 IDE raid channels also as raid 0+1 for the above reasons. My normal IDE channels are used for Linux and the DVD and CD writers. Ok 12 drives in one box might seem excessive but as I use a total of 8 internal fans there are no heat problems. Regards

Jurgen