Hard drive problems with windows xp sp3

[jonl326]

JJ 3000 I hooked up 4 120 gig seagates on the raid card and 1 could not be found whats the difference from raid 1 and and raid 5

[JJ 3000]

Check this out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Basically RAID5 is more reliable and provides more redundancy. RAID 5 distibutes data and parity info evenly across all of your drives. RAID 5 is the fastest and the most common implementation of RAID and it requires at least three drives. However a RAID 5 array will use about one drives Worth of space for parity (error correction). So if you have four 120 gig drives the effective storage capacity of your array will be about 360 gigs. But, if one of your drives fail, all of your data will still be intact.

RAID 1 mirroring will use the drive space differently. With a mirrored array you will only be able to use about 240 gigs of storage space. Plus mirroring is SLOW.

JJ 3000 I hooked up 4 120 gig seagates on the raid card and 1 could not be found whats the difference from raid 1 and and raid 5

A better question is: Should I set up a hardware or a software RAID configuration?

Hardware RAID is a lot more reliable. (I don't have too much experience with software RAID)

What are you trying to accomplish with your array?

[JJ 3000]

Did your card come with a CD?

[jonl326]

All I am trying to do is make sure that if one fails all is not lost I am trying to learn autocad and I wont to make sure I don't loose anything My last system only had 1 hard drive and it died all was lost don't wont to go through that again

[JJ 3000]

Well then...

Did your card come with a CD?

Can you post a screen shot of your My Computer and Disk Management?

If you went to the trouble and expense to buy a RAID card, you should at least try to set up a RAID 5 array.

If you need help, post back.

Do you have the CD?

[JJ 3000]

All I am trying to do is make sure that if one fails all is not lost I am trying to learn autocad and I wont to make sure I don't loose anything My last system only had 1 hard drive and it died all was lost don't wont to go through that again

If you don't want to lose your data, just make sure that you use good back ups. A combination of using a flash drive or Cd's along with online storage will insure that you can recover your data.

[jonl326]

No my card didnt come with a cd bought it used and I had the hard drives running in raid 1 but when I rebooted it they were back in standard set up in windows cant figure it out set up in hardware not in software

[JJ 3000]

What is the brand and model of your RAID card?

[jonl326]

Promise Ultra 133 TX2