Why does the AR31S have two hard drives?

[wuzzbert]

Why not just have one bigger one? Is it so you can ghost stuff over, if so, how do you do it?

You've all been a great help on here as im new to all this, thanks

[Blencogo]

Hi wuzzbert,

The AR31S has two hard drives for two reasons.

1. You cannot get a single 2.5 inch hard drive bigger than 180GB. This is now changing as bigger drives become available.

2. The main reason is for speed of access to the data on the drives. The two drives act like a single drive volume because they are configured in RAID 0. Your Vaio writes (and reads) data to both drives at the same time making them twice as fast as a normal drive. RAID 0 is called "Striped Raid" because your Vaio writes a 'Stripe' of 128MB to one drive then the next 128MB stripe goes to the second drive then back to the first drive .......etc.
The good news is the speed but there is bad news - because data is recorded in stripes alternately, if one disc fails you lose all your data. So theoretically you have twice the likelyhood of a failure. However, hard drives are very reliable these days.

You can change to RAID 1 which is "Mirrored Raid" where the same data is sent identically to both discs so you have an automatic back up. However, this is rarely used because external drives are so cheap these days to back up to and the larger capacity is better used for the laptop.

Have a look at RAID in something like Wikipedia.

[kee-lo_]

My gran would probably say "in case one makes you sick", lol, but I think it's mainly because it's a desktop replacement therefore if it's your main machine it's the flagship. Also very good for multimedia, you know what video is like, large!