Swapping out Internal Hard Drives
 

I have 2 - 75 gig hard drives that I believe are RAIDed together. These drives are not my system drives, but just for media. I have replacement drives of the "same" make and model as whats in the computer already. I am assuming this should be a simple "open up, swap, and format the drive" type of job....Or is this something that can screw up my system. Any advice would be appreciated.

Ezra

(PC WIN2000 dual PIII

I can't see any problem - I swap media drives all the time - as long as you configure them properly, you shouldn't have any issues.

What is RAIDing the drives together, Windows or a RAID card and how are the drives RIADed together Raid 0 or Raid 1.

As long as you don't care about the data on the old drives there shouldn't be much problem adding the new drives since you have no data you're worried about losing.

I'm not sure of the technology terms - "Raid" Just that the 2 - 75 gig hard drives were in the computer when I purchased the system - and they are named as 1 150gig HD.
I don't care about the data on the drives.
I am just not sure if it as easy as swapping out a DVD drive -
do I have to do something like "dismount" the drives in Windows before I remove them?
If something goes wrong, will it effect the rest of my system i.e. the system drive or the 4 external hard drives (via firewire) that I am presently using?

Ezra

No, you don't need to dismouunnt the old drives or anything like that.

I don't want to say that removing those drives won't affect your system in any way because i don't know your system and how it is set up BUT as long as nothing system related is on those drives then you should be fine....AGAIN, i don't know your system.

also, just so you'll know, it sounds like your 75 gb drives are in a RAID 0 configuration which is not redundant so if you lose 1 drive you lose all the data on those drives.

Thanks. I had a feeling. I will have some down time in a few weeks, and I'll try the swap then. This way if anything goes wrong, I won't back log myself. Ever since I had a warning about my internal drives, I have been using external drives. They have been working well. I figure that I have these exact replacement drives, I might as well use them. Thanks again.

Ezra