dual drives or dual boot?

[thehandler]

This is a challenge to some of the better minds out there.
I just added a second hard drive to my system and completely mirrored my original drive to it, so they are identical. I did this for two reasons, I wanted to be able to back up my system in the case of a hd crash, AND I wanted to assign one of the drives for gaming only and the other would be all my routine stuff like e-mail and word proc, etc.
The benefit to this is that I can take my routine drive, lets call it C, and run it at stock FSB and run my vid card at stock speeds as well and have all my programs up and running.
This would be done via Powerstrip and Raise FSB both of which can run from, and open in WIndows. This way I can run the Game drive with higher settings and disable all programs in the start menu not needed, etc etc.
This is a great idea and works just fine as long as I am willing to go into the bios every time to change the drive sequence.
This is a giant pain in the butt. What I need is either a hot key or a Windows based way to quickly access the bios without re-starting. Does this exist?
Better yet, FAR better in fact would ba a way of switching back and forth from C to D drive from the WIndows enviroment.
There may be other options I am not aware of either that some of you may be able to suggest. As long as you are clear on what I am tyring to do, it will hopefully be easier to come up with a solution. Thanks guys and gals. Mike

[mrpcman]

Why not run raid 0 and dual boot?

[thehandler]

Do you mean by way of buying a raid controller card such as the promise? I had thought of doing that anyway to get the benefits of raid since it isn't built into my board. At the same time it was noce to be able to take advantage of the newer drives ata 133 interface since my board only supports 100mhz on the AGP bus.
But I am still not sure how I would switch back and forthe from drive to dirve on a whim even with the raid set up. Can you? Thanks Mike

[mrpcman]

Raid 0 mirrors the drive for redundancy, so then you would just dual boot, but basically only have the capasity of one drive which is currently like what your doing now.

[Azriel]

Just get two IDE pull out drive bays. Jumper each of them as master, but hook one up to the primary IDE, and the other to the secondary. When you want to switch, all you have to do is power down, and switch the caddys.

If you have the CD's set as slaves, your HDD's would be C and E (D and F would be the slaves)

Or.. you could just dual boot.

[dimmreaper]

Originally posted by mrpcman
Raid 0 mirrors the drive for redundancy

RAID 1 mirrors, RAID 0 strips. RAID 0+1 strips and mirrors, RAID 5 strips and mirrors with a minimum of 3 disks but more disks allows you to use a higher percentage of there combined capacity.

[Azriel]

Raid 5 stripes with distributed parity ( A small area of each drive has data from the other drives to allow rebuild of a failed drive. ). Raid 3 stripes with all of the parity data on a single drive. Raid three will actually beat raid 5 in large arrays if the parity drive is on it's own channel.

[dimmreaper]

Yes, but RAID 5 seems to be more reliable.

[Azriel]

Yes, RAID 5 is much better. With RAID 3, the chance of not being able to reciver from a drive failure increases with each additional drive. It's hit or miss, really. The reliability/speed trade off is probably not woth it.

[dimmreaper]

Say, I wonder if you can use software to strip accross two RAID 5 arrays

I never thought about it until now, but I suppose it is possible. The PCI bus would probably end up being a bottleneck though.

[Azriel]

I'm sure it's possible.

There are alot of different raid specifications. I'm sure that is covered by one of them. I'm just running a biggass raid 5 (Ten 4.3 gig baracudas) In the Duron 800 I have a suicide stripe of two 4.5 gig drives that don't match.. I think one os a fujitsu, and the other is an IBM.

[mrpcman]

Originally posted by dimmreaper
RAID 1 mirrors, RAID 0 strips. RAID 0+1 strips and mirrors, RAID 5 strips and mirrors with a minimum of 3 disks but more disks allows you to use a higher percentage of there combined capacity.

your totally right, i'm dyslexic at times.

[martin]

For convenience and security i like the idea of two pull-out HDD bays and swap them, for simplicity and ease of use i dual boot 98SE on my C partition and XP on the D. I installed XP after installing 98SE. I boot into XP for internet, e-mail and digicam and 98 for games.