RAID 0 without formatting?

[Scythy]

I just installed a second Western Digital 250GB HD. I hooked them both into my new RAID card thing.

To my suprize, it wanted to format both of them for the RAID to work! :dead:

Is there a way to get a RAID 0 going without formatting?

I reeeally don't want to lose 80GB of anime and 90GB of program files

 

[Didou]

Intel has a software (Intel Application Accelerator) that allows you to setup your RAID array from Windows & it then "re-spreads" the data accross both HDDs.

In other cases you have to format the drives.

 

[BrownPaper]

Originally posted by Scythy
Is there a way to get a RAID 0 going without formatting?

I reeeally don't want to lose 80GB of anime and 90GB of program files

If you don't want to lose those files, why do you want to run RAID 0? You are increasing your chances of losing those files if one of your hard drives get messed up if you run RAID 0.

 

[Scythy]

Well.. I never had a HD fail on me. In the 11 years I've been using computers.

Thanks Didou I'll look into that.

 

[Didou]

Taken from -> Intel i875 article @ Anandtech.com

Where Intel is able to offer some additional value over the competition is in their RAID Application Accelerator drivers. Normally when you want to upgrade from a single drive to a dual drive RAID 0 array, you have to backup all of your data and create the RAID 0 array, which ends up destroying all the data you had on the original drive. Intel's solution simply requires you to enable Intel RAID in the BIOS, even when you only have one drive, and upon upgrading to a second drive you simply tell the Application Accelerator driver to create a RAID 0 array and the array is created in the background without any data loss.

The process works quite well and makes upgrading to a RAID 0 setup quite easy; don't let the ease of migration fool you though, moving to a RAID 0 setup actually increases the chance of data loss. With only one drive in a system your data is safe so long as that one drive doesn't fail, but with two drives in RAID 0, should any one of them fail, you could potentially lose all of your data.