Upgrading my PC - Hard Drives

[shiningstar]

Alright so I built my first computer about a year and a half ago. I am upgrading to a better mobo, cpu, etc. I'm keeping some parts and some of those is the 2 hard drives. I was wondering what I am going to need to do when putting it in the new PC.

Right now I don't have them in RAID mode, and was curious if I should do that.

Also when I put them in the new PC, should I clear all the data before doing so? Or does it not matter? And maybe is there any way to save the data, so i don't have to waste time transferring all my files? I currently have Vista, and will be installing Win 7 on the new computer.

Thanks for your help.

 

[spacekadet]

You might get away with not having to do anything to your drives. I have successfully put a hard drive from one machine onto another and it booted right up. This is the best case scenario and may not work for you. Copy all your important files onto removable media just in case you have to reload your os.

You didn't list a raid mode so I will list the two you can. Raid 1 allows you to save data on two hard drives exaclty the same way. If one drive fails the other will have the exact same data so you don't lose anything. Raid 0 saves data on two different drives separately. It takes chunks of information and saves half to one drive and half to the other. Both drives act as one and if either fails you lose all your data. You will have to reload your operating system to run raid.

Are you upgrading to 7 or doing full install?

 

[shozzking]

I would highly recommend against doing RAID 0, it was waaaay faster than a single drive when I had my array and I managed to boot to windows in 40 seconds(not counting the time it took me to type in my password). But then I lost one of my 2 drives. I had to redownload 240GB of steam games and all of my music/videos. I'd recommend that you get another hard drive and put them into a RAID 5 array, with RAID 5 if you lose one drive then you can still use your computer normally and when you replace the faulty drive then it'll rebuild itself and you wont lose any data. Its not quite as fast as RAID 0 but its work the money