i just bought a maxtor 80gb sata and i have an 80gb ide hd so i want to know what program would copy the entire hd and how much time would i take (i have like 20gb used)
here's the first example i found (probably too much info!) re RAID -
Quote:RAID
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). A collection of disk drives that offers increased performance and fault tolerance. There are a number of different RAID levels. The three most commonly used are 0, 1, and 5:
* Level 0: striping without parity (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks).
* Level 1: disk mirroring or duplexing.
* Level 2: bit-level striping with parity
* Level 3: byte-level striping with dedicated parity. Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance.
* Level 4: block-level striping with dedicated parity
* Level 5: block-level striping with distributed parity
* Level 6: block-level striping with two sets of distributed parity for extra fault tolerance
* Level 7: Asynchronous, cached striping with dedicated parity
(hadn't heard of 6 and 7 before i don't think..)
RAID 4 is obscure but has been adapted for NetApp filers (Network Appliance) and they've called their filesystem the 'WAFL' filesystem. (Write Anywhere File Layout). We use this technology now; i know it's irrelevant to you but no harm in a bit of extra info now and then. - http://www.cuddletech.com/veritas/raidtheory/x62.html
basically with PC's you are able to use RAID 0 which is just plain striping of data but no protection ie the data is spread across both drives and if you lose one disk you lose ALL data.
PC's can also do stripe-mirroring i think; at work i usually build huge servers with stripe-mirroring on huge disk arrays/SAN's but sometimes use RAID 5 also. (have never bothered to use RAID on a PC yet though, one of the other posters will be able to fill in the gaps for you)
after messing my hd up i placed both in raid0 and then they wouldnt boot so i removed them from raid and it said if u remove from raid u loose all data i said yes but it didnt say it was formating or anything so now after a clean install of windows my other hd isnt recognized (the ide 1) none r in raid me and raid no friends after loosing my other hd
did you try to raid your ide and sata drives together? that doesn't work, my friend. try removing the sata drive from your compie and setting the ide drive to master and boot from it with windows 98 or such in the disc drive. if it starts up, you can fdisk and use a low-level format to wipe the drive. that *should* do'er.
you got it to work? well, anyway, that's a no no. if you want to raid, you need to get another sata drive, or you'll have some mega-issues. just wipe the ide and use it as a backup or spare.