PLEASE..ANY HELP/SUGGESTIONS & IDEAS WELCOME

[broochie]

Greetings,
Recently got my VAIO AR31S last week, originally it came with 2 x 120GB 5400rpm SATA HDDs' & Vista Home premium installed. Well with these days of 10 Mega Pixel cameras l decided to do a Hard drive upgrade will do, so l got myself 2 x 200GB 7200rpm SATA HDDs' & decided to do a clean install as well with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.

Juss would like to know, how can l configure the system to show ONLY one volume, instead of two drives, l would certainly love to have the same configuration it originally came with, 240GB showing as one hard drive. Any ideas will be certainly be appreciated & thank you well in advance.

Cheers

[davemee]

Broochie, please keep us posted as to how you get on with this upgrade... I'm particularly interested in the impact on battery life, I'd imagine an extra 3000rpm won't come for free.

[Blencogo]

Hi broochie and welcome to Club Vaio,

If you want your AR31S configured as before, you will need to use RAID 0 configuration.

You can only set this up on newly formatted discs with nothing on them and you will need to pre-load the SATA/RAID Drivers from a USB Drive at the beginning of the Vista Ultimate installation. You will also need to pre-load the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to configure your system.

The reason you must do it before you write anything to the discs is that RAID 0 treats both discs as a single volume and writes to both discs at once - the first 128MB of data to Disc 1 then the next 128MB of data to Disc 2, then back to Disc 1. This makes Read/Write times very fast.

If you have installed Vista onto just one drive, you will need to reinstall it if you want the original RAID 0 configuration.

[broochie]

Will keep you posted Davemee, soon as l get started, juss happen to be waiting for th Vista Ultimate to arrive, currently being delivered. Well l must say the 3000rpm & 160GB dont come in any way for free, did get 'em for £199 incl p&p, btw these are 2 Seagate Momentus 7200.02 200GB 16MB HDDs. Well its sort of my norm to pluck out the factory installed HDD for a higher capacity or faster one.

Cheers

[broochie]

Thanks Blencogo, concerning the upgrade, initially l havent started yet as waiting for the Vista Ultimate DVD which will arrive shortly.

Now u did mention about preloading the SATA/RAID drivers in your post, was wondering were could l find these including the Intel Matrix Storage Manager? I do have to preload all these prior to the installation? Sorry to say, but it does seem like a nightmare, it wasnt the case with my old VAIO SZ2XP/C, it didnt have two HDDs & l dont remember going through this process, but as they as, there is a 1st time for everything.

A bit nervous though.....

Cheers

[broochie]

LADIES & GENTLEMAN... I'M DONE. WASNT THAT EASY BUT CAME OUT THROUGH BRILLIANTLY, CURRENTLY I'M TYPING ON MY NEW:

SONY VAIO VGN-AR31S
400GB SATA HDD (2 X 200GB 7200RPM HDDs)
WINDOWS VISTA ULTIMATE EDITION

all the other specs are similar to the factory shipped AR31S. Will be performing tests later on during the show, just gotta install some patches & updates. Everything from the remote control unit to the buttons, all are working flawlessly. Thanks Blencogo your tips did come in quite handy.

Even start up time seems to have dropped...