Dual Drive/RAID Setup - W700ds

[Sasha]

I have a W700ds which was NOT configured for RAID by Lenovo.

I am planning to set up a dual drive set up. The details are :

W700ds with 160GB hard drive from Lenovo (no RAID set up, no secondary drives present)
128GB SSD SATA II drive (not yet in hand, but planning to get it)

My questions are:
1) Can I set up my laptop to have two drives, with the SSD being my primary drive and the 160GB hard drive being the secondary drive?
2) Can I set up a RAID using these two drives? If I can, what type of RAID can I set up, RAID 0 or RAID 1?

TIA

Sasha

[deforest]

I haven't tried this but I believe either option is viable if both drives are sata based.

But I would question the logic of either setup.

For raid mirroring you would be stuck at using the lowest disk drive capacity, 128GB, and then you would also be stuck at using the lowest drive performance, since both drives would need to be in sync with each other if a write error occurs.

For raid stripping, it may make a little more sense, but still with the non-ssd drive, I would think that you wouldn't see much performance increase over your current setup. If instead you used the ssd drive exclusively, I think you would have much more of a performance increase, i.e. this would be the highest performance.

If I had 2 drives this dissimilar in speed/performance, I would use them in either as the ssd as the boot drive and non-ssd as a data drive, or ssd as the main drive, and non-ssd as backup drive for the ssd.

[bhtooefr]

I believe there are some RAID modes like SAFE33 or SAFE50, maybe you could create a SAFE mode that used the entire SSD and first 128 GiB of the HDD, leaving the rest of the HDD as a separate partition, if that's how you wanted to do it.

[SmoothRunnings]

I have a W700ds which was NOT configured for RAID by Lenovo.

I am planning to set up a dual drive set up. The details are :

W700ds with 160GB hard drive from Lenovo (no RAID set up, no secondary drives present)
128GB SSD SATA II drive (not yet in hand, but planning to get it)

My questions are:
1) Can I set up my laptop to have two drives, with the SSD being my primary drive and the 160GB hard drive being the secondary drive?
2) Can I set up a RAID using these two drives? If I can, what type of RAID can I set up, RAID 0 or RAID 1?

TIA

Sasha

RAID 1 Mirror, RAID 0 Stripe.

If you don't care about the data on your notebook and you really want use RAID 0 go ahead because if one of the drives fails you will have lost all your data with zero possibly of recovering it. RAID 1 will probably work but you will only be able to use 128GB of your 160GB hard drive the rest will not be available for use.

Also you do risk more problems with having a faster and slower drive in your RAID, its like chaining a Ferrari and a Honda Civic together.

Andrew