Drives for ML110 G3

[Geoffrey Forbes]

The ML110 G3 I recently bought has an 80GB Maxtor SATA 1.5Gb/s Drive. I want to run a mirror Raid system.

I want to buy two larger drives and insert them, after removing the current drive. I'm thinking Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB SATA 3.0Gb/sec 7200rpm (SKU=6V200E0).

This being my first HP System, and having usually built computers from scratch, will it void any warranties (or cause any trouble if I access HP Support) if I Do It Myself? Save some $ too.

Can I do this without reinstalling the OS(SBS)? Specifically is there any way to activate RAID without losing the OS partition on the drive?

[Anthony Martin_1]

Hi Geoffrey,
The ML110G3 does not list 200GB SATA disk drives as being supported, so you would be on your own if these are installed.

Activating RAID for the SATA drives using the BIOS and not losing the OS, nope, sorry. The 3rd party RAID utility wants build the RAID set from scratch and will destroy any data on the disk drive(s). I have seen this recently - ugly.

Anthony

[RufusG]

I installed a Promise S150TX4 SATA RAID Controller ( bought from HP ) and 2 additional 160GB SATA drives ( bought elsewhere ) in a RAID-1 configuration.
The Promise card was not expensive.

I left the Operating System on the single original 80GB drive and I store a duplicate of the Data on the new RAID drive.

Now my data is in 2 places:
- on a single drive
- on the "fail-safe" drive

This also means that I can re-build the Operating System on the single drive without losing my data on the RAID drive.

If I was starting again today I would go for a SATA-2 system with 3Gbps drives and controller, rather than the SATA-1 1.5Gbps system I have now.