I recently acquired a set of Seagate 320GB sata drives, I wanted to set them as raid 1 and use them as secure backup drive for my main 500GB Western Digital Drive. Exact models as per windows device manager: WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 ST332082 0AS SCSI Disk Device ST3360320AS In bios I can only see the WD drive, and one of the seagates, not sure which. All are sata drives, I also have 2 Sony DVD burners A700/A500 using EIDE Master/Slave on single cable. In short, I want the Seagate drives to show up as one raid1 drive, so I know that whatever data I backup to it is safe, while the WD drive is split into a 127GB(OS & program files), And 337GB(music, movies & alike)...stuff to be backed up for the most part. Guess the "In short" wasn't very short, But would still appreciate any help anyone can offer... -=TYVM=- Kids in the backseat cause accidents, Accidents in the backseat cause kids.

I couldn't find your MBoard listed on Abit's site so I will just ask you. What kind of RAID controllers are you using? They do support RAID 1 don't they? I believe the TWO 320GB drives will appear as an array, not one drive. The whole idea is to have the ability to rebuild the array should one drive fail. That would, by extension require the drives to show separately. Without knowing how the drives are connected(integrated or card), hard to advise further. Is the WD drive also SATA? If you have integrated SATA controllers and the WD is connected to the first SATA port I think you will need to skip the second and use 3&4. Look in the BIOS for settings, of course RAID drivers need to be installed. The drives should show in Disk management. Verify that all SATA controllers are enabled in the BIOS.

WDC WD5000AAKS - 500 GB, SATA II ST3320620AS - 7200 rpm 320gb barracuda, SATA II ST3360320AS - 335gb, SATA II The latter 2 are not the same size. I don't know much about RAID, but I think... 1. If you use RAID for the two Seagate drives only 320gb of the 335gb drive is used. 2. Windows sees the RAID drives in the same array as one drive or one array, but your bios should see all three SATA drives. - Check your SATA cables - e.g. the SATA data and SATA power cable should "latch" into the ports on both ends - the cables should not move in the port when you simply wiggle the cable - it's not hard to break off what makes a SATA data cable latch on the cable - if it doesn't latch, tape it in place, or get a new cable. - Some Seagate SATA II drives have pins you can install a jumper on to force the drive into the slower SATA mode - both drives should preferably be in the same mode - preferably no jumper installed. That shouldn't affect whether the drives are seen by the bios in this case, but it might be a problem for the RAID setup, and even if it isn't if one or both drives have the jumper installed their max data transfer burst speeds will be slower. - or see this: The BIOS does not detect or recognize the ATA / SATA hard drive http://seagate.custhelp.com/cgi-bin... You may have more than one SATA controller, and if so not all of them may be capable of RAID. E.g. Sometimes the first one isn't capable of RAID, the second one is. See your mboard manual and make sure you connect the SATA drives you want to use in RAID mode on the right headers on the mboard. ..... Possible. Some older mboards that were meant to be used with SATA but not SATA II drives have chipsets that cannot recognize a SATA II drive (as a SATA drive) unless the SATA II drive is forced into SATA mode. In that case all three SATA II drives would have to have a jumper installed on pins on the drive to force them into SATA mode so that the bios can recognize them.

After reading tubes response I went back and looked more carefully at the drive specs and realised that the BIOS must be seeing these drives or Device Manager wouldn't be seeing them. The procedure for setting up a RAID array will vary from board to board. As I asked before, does your board even support the RAID configuration you want to use. Read your manual. Tubes brought up the point that your drives are not the same exact drives. With some controllers this may be an issue. SATA controllers normally serve two drives per controller, even though each drive is considered a master. I think that RAID 1 may require both drive to be connected to the same controller and as tubes points out it must be a controller that supports the RAID.

I would suggest an alternate to using raid. I would keep the drives non-raid and then alternate between them when doing backups. That way you have a backup-backup. Suppose you do a backup to a raid drive of 'bad data', the bad data goes to both drives.

i ended up just giving the 2nd raid drive to my sister....lol...i guess one backup drive will hafta do...i'll just toss whatever important crap i have on my external

IMO the safest backup solution is optical disk. DVDR or CDR are both cheap and pretty safe to store. Being non magnetic and non mechanical, there aren't the same concerns as you can have with a harddrive. I might add that an added benefit is the ability to make multiple copies cheaply and quickly.