About a year and a half ago, when I first put my computer together, I decided to stinge a bit and only bought one hard drive. I finally decided that it's about time to complete my plan of mirroring it, before I run into problems of data loss. So I went out and bought another drive ... that was more than a month ago.
Mirroring my hard drive has got to be the most frustrating hardware issue I have ever faced. I remember when I first mentioned my intention to the Funan salesman and he said, "Software RAID of an existing drive? I'm not sure if that would work..." Well, I decided to try it anyway.
So I bought another 250 GB drive and brought it home, opened the casing and realised that unlike the IDE drives I am more familiar with, the motherboard does not have spare dangling SATA cables. Neither did the new hdd come with one. So I closed it up, went back out to a computer show and bought a SATA cable. Might pleased with my ingenuity not going all the way back to Funan for a simple cable.
The next weekend when I had time again, I opened the computer up and ripped open the anti-static bag. To my horror, an IDE drive was staring back at me. So the next weekend I went back to Funan to change it.
And the next weekend I opened the computer again and stared at my computer's inerds in disbelief when I realised there were no more free 3.5" bays. Cursing myself for not realising this earlier, I shifted the DVD drive to free up room on the 5.25" slot. Then it was back to Funan again, and while most stored told me they no longer sold the brackets to fit a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" slot, I finally found one that did. But when I got home I realised it didn't ... all the holes didn't match and the brackets didn't quite fill out the extra space.
So I finally threw in the towel and went back to Funan to get an external USB 2.0 hdd case. I didn't have high hopes that I could configure a software RAID with an external drive, but what the heck I just wanted to get it over and done with. But when I plugged the USB jack into my computer ... the computer did not detect it. What the hell. I don't know if the problem was with the hdd or the casing, but I was a little bit too tired of the whole thing to figure it out just then.
Part of me refuses to be defeated by a stupid piece of metal and a bundle of wires. Part of me wants to go back to Funan and just throw the problem at them. Most of me just wants to write off the whole thing because I don't have time for this nonsense. If my hdd crashes now it would just be hilarious!
I guess I'll never know if you can do a software RAID of an existing drive.
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