I have a new 250G SATA drive I want to add to my Dimension 8400 which currently has a single 80G drive (not partitioned into more than one drive). I would like to create an 80GB partition on the new drive, and migrate my existing drive to form a RAID 1 volume (consisting of the old drive and the new 80G partition). Is this possible? Can I do this and still have the other 170GB usable on the new drive? Any thoughts are appreciated. Mark

You may or may not get that to work. I tried it on a dell system that didn't fully support 48 bit. See dell forums for large drive issues. There are some raid cards that use Silicon Labs chipset sil0680. It can do all sorts of odd hd to hd sets. I am not sure you could ever use the leftover portion exactly. Many adapters require matched hard drives to work at all. I would not bother with a raid 1. Use a good backup plan and go with raid 0. As with all raid setups the bios may or may not like to be told to use the scsi boot device. (most bios' claim an ata raid is a scsi for other reasons) Don't forget that you need your raid adapter drivers in the xp install if you wish any clone or image to work. Get and test the floppy drivers too. Might need them.

I must disagree with Jefro in part. I advise the normal home user not to use raid 0. It increases the chance of losing data. If you lose either drive, you lose everything. I agree with not using raid 1 (or any raid) and instead use a good backup system. You can't beat using an imaging system like Ghost or Acronis. Image you C: drive to the big drive and you have a great backup system. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

Thanks for the feedback. Based on this and other reading I'm leaning toward just baking things up.

"Thanks for the feedback. Based on this and other reading I'm leaning toward just baking things up." Just to be perfectly clear, RAID 1 is NOT a backup. IT is intended to prevent down-time in mission critical environments. In a home environment it can be cheap insurance in case a drive fails. However, if files are lost or corrupted due to mechanical malfunctions, viruses, etc - then those files are corrupted or lost on both drives. Michael J