so I bought another HDD WD Caviar black 640 gb to attempt to stripe with another one that is also a WD black 640 gb hdd. I have a bunch of files/data on my current hdd. I have never striped a hard drive before so I was wondering if I do stripe them, will I lose all my data on my current HDD or does it keep it? I'm sorry if it's a dumb question....
It's not a dumb question but does require some study. This page speaks about striping and appears one also needs a RAID setup:
What is disk striping? - Definition from WhatIs.com
In computers that use multiple hard disk systems, disk striping is the process of dividing a body of data into blocks and spreading the data blocks across several partitions on several hard disks. Each stripe is the size of the smallest partition. For example, if three partitions are selected with one partition equaling 150megabytes, another 100MB, and the third 50MB, each stripe will be 50 MB in size. It is wise to create the partitions equal in size to prevent wasting disk space. Each stripe created is part of the stripe set. Disk striping is used with redundant array of independent disks (RAID). RAID is a storage system that uses multiple disks to store and distribute data. Up to 32 hard disks can be used with disk striping.
Most likely you would loose all data. I think this is possible without data loss with some Enterprise level controllers but not with anything you get get at a half reasonable price.
You are speaking of RAID 0. The purpose of this configuration is to improve performance but in typical usage the gains are usually quite modest. In RAID 0 all data is written in alternating blocks to both drives. The big downside to to this is that if one drive fails you loose everything. When using RAID 0 maintaining regular backups is a MUST. Not having backups is asking for trouble.
In most cases RAID 0 is more trouble than it is worth.
thanks for the help guys, the more i'm looking into it, the benefits aren't worth striping with HDD's as they are with SSD's.
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