Hard drive configuration

[drgagx]

I have experienced several problems with my new Dell XPS420 mostly relating to raid1 on two Samsung 500GB hard drives (I am already on my second pc within a month). Last week I was advised that there had been problems with the Samsung drives and I was offered two replacement Western Digital drives, which I accepted. The engineer installed the new drives on Friday but failed to install all the required drivers and software, in particular the NIC drivers and Intel Storage matrix software. It has taken the best part of this morning on the phone to identify and install the missing drivers so that I now have an internet connection. The engineer who installed the replacement hard drives also left me with only a C drive partition on the array, whereas the pc, as delivered, came with three partitions - C at 338GB as the main drive and D at 112GB and E at 15GB for backup.

Before I re-install all my programme software including Edius (for the third time) I need to understand my hard drive configuration options. I think these are
1 Live with the existing 500GB mirrored C drive and dispense with the apparent belt and braces approach of mirrored drives with back up partitions; 500GB seems too big to me for a C drive.
2 Create new partitions on the C drive to create a back up partitions as they were before; but is there software available that will enable me to create new partitions on an existing Raid1 drive? I cannot see any way of doing this from within Vista.
3 Go back to two separate 500GB drives without Raid; this is the configuration on my older pc (with partitons), supported by various external usb drives which I use as source or destination for DV input/output.

At the moment I am only working in DV (for which this pc is obvious overkill) but eventually I intend to buy an AVCHD camera and create output on BluRay discs (this pc is equipped with a BluRay disc burner). I will keep my existing external usb drives but I also have an esata connection available for future use.

Does anyone have any advice or comment to offer on these options or to add others I have not thought of? In particular I would like to know if there is software that can alter Raid configurations without losing all data and requiring the re-installation of the OS.

[gdame]

1) No need to have your OS system drive on a raid. Just make a bootable disk image backup onto DVD/s when you get the system just how you like it. That is all the restoration protection that you need.

2) The system "C" hard drive should not have any partitions that will be used for storing media files for video editing. There should be a seperate drive/s dedicated for that.

3) I would not use USB drives unless that was my only last resort in a pinch for editing drives.

If you do not have enough SATA connectors on your mainboard, by a SATA card or SATA RAID card for your media drives.

[GrassValley_MD]

I agree... Your OS would be better served by a single drive that is dedicated to your OS only.

The raid should be two (or more) seperate drives that are raided together.

As far as USB drives? You would have to look at the Sustained Data transfer rates and see if they will meet your needs. Also remember that published data rates are not usually correct.


Mike

[drgagx]

Thanks for those helpful replies. My usb drives cope, just, with the demands of my existing DV data. My problem here is that I am now up to seven separate external drives though three of these are devoted to archived avi and vob edits. When I get to AVCHD my intention is to use the external sata connection for captured material and edit outputs.