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.
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.
Comment