[gamefreak1398]

A friend of mine recently bought a new hard drive and asked me to create a RAID 0 array for him. One of the hard drives is already in use independently.

I was wondering, do I have to reformat his HD before creating the RAID 0 array? or can I just keep the existing data?

 

[Veto1024]

as things are, you must reformat it. Unless you have a spare hard drive laying around that you can store all the stuff on.

What raid-0 does is it splits the information. If you have a 01010101010110101 line of information, the first 0 goes on one drive, the 1 then goes on the second drive and then next 0 will go on the first drive and it will continue to alternate that way. The information on its own is a garbled piece of information read on a single drive but when you put the drives together and do the alternation pattern, the correct information shows up.

Not sure why i said all that.... but no, u cant keep the hard drive or "migrate" the information onto the raid.

 

[gamefreak1398]

Alright, Thanks

Another question...

If there are two HDs:
- same capacity (80 GB)
- same buffer (8 MB)
- same rotational speed (7200 rpm)
- same interface (SATA)
- but different company + brand (Seagate Barracuda ST380013AS & Hitachi HDS722580VLSA80)

set up on a RAID 0 array, would there be a performance flaw?
would it be better if two exactly identical drives are set up?