Question on Raid Autodetect ATA and Raid on

Question

I have Dell Dimension E520 Core 2 duo that originally came with 250Gb and Vista. I purchased Windows 7 a few years ago but kept on delaying the installation of Windows 7 for one reason or another.

Last week my graphic card developed a memory fault and for some reason Vista disk became unbootable. I tried all kind of things but no luck. At some stage I changed SETUP >> DRIVES >> SATA Operation from 'RAID ON' to 'RAID AUTODETECT ATA'' and went on to install Windows 7 on another disk.

So, current configuration is as follows:

Drive 0 is 1Tb (Western Digital and has Windows 7 on it
Drive 1 is the original 250Gb with old Vista (Luckily I still have my docs intact on it)
SETUP >> DRIVES >> SATA Operation is set to 'RAID AUTODETECT ATA'

My question is this:

If I change this setting to 'RAID ON' the computer reports both drives and non-RAID and stops booting. I want to know what setting I should use for SATA Operation. Dell say 'RAID ON' even if the system has one drive... they claim it gives better performance.

My BIOS is original (circa 2007)

Thanks in advance

ShaneShadow · Accepted Answer

I run raid with an mSata SSD harddrive and a mechanical harddrive. The performance is amazing. I tried my pc's performance without raid and you can clearly see a difference.

However, it makes no sense to run raid on a single hard drive. Just makes no sense.

I don't think Raid will really help with performance of two mechanical drives. There might be some improvement, but really its not worth it.

DELL-Chris M · Answer

If you want that change, you will have to reformat the drives in a RAID and start over. Not worth it.

Indol · Answer

Thanks Chris. It's just that Dell recommends 'Raid on' even if there is just one drive. I thought you needed at least 2 for Raid. Anyway, is there much of a performance hit?

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Question on Raid Autodetect ATA and Raid on

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