I bought an Adaptec 1210SA RAID SATA controller and two 160GB Hard drivers a few months ago. I've combinded them into one 320GB hard drive which has about 30-40gb free space. Its a Window Media Centre PC so all that hard drive space is for recorded TV shows.

Anyway my motherboard died thanks to a dodgy powersupply that went kamakze on me. So I bought a new MB with a SATA RAID controller onboard.

First question.

If I decide to ditch the 1212SA and go for the onboard option, do I have to remove all of the stuff on the hard drive, reformat them using the new controller and copy all the stuff back on? Or is there another way?

Second Question.
If the answer to the first question is no, Does anyone have 300gb of free space they could lend me?

Third and serious question.

Is this wise? I've heard someone say that onboard SATA controller can be slower because they connect at the southbridge and not the northbridge. I don't know enough about hardware to make sense of this but the argument was in response to stuttering playback of a recorded tv file on a Window Media Centre machine.


Thanks very much for any help provided.

Okay, I think I can save you a heap of trouble because I'm right in the middle of a server migration with similar issues. The main problem you will face is that windows is keyed to boot from your original SATA Card, unlike IDE if windows wasn't installed from scratch with the right drives it wont be able to boot itself from your drives. Your best bet is to stick with the SATA card and preferably replace the motherboard with an identicle model or you will have to spend a fair while fiddling with drivers for all the new hardware. It's also important to note that changing motherboard's is like switching to a whole new system and in these sort of cases Winodws may simple just give you a blue screen of death, no mater what you do.

Also generaly yes seperate SATA cards are faster.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply mate.

My windows install is on a seperate IDE drive so no worries with drivers ect. I have already added the SATA controller and can access some SATA hard drives.

I've also already reinstalled windows.

My real query is how do I migrate from one controller to the other?

I can't really keep the existing card because it conflicts with the chipset on the Motherboard and the 1210SA drives me up the wall.

Thanks for the help

Okay so I'm guessing that your having trouble getting the raid 0 to migrate to the new controller. Well unfortunatly I don't know of any trick or utilities that can do this directly. Your only option would be to run the drives on the old card and ghost the partition to a new raid or seperate drive. You should be able to disable the onboard raid in the bios to get the old card running too. On the up side it's a good excuse to buy a new 400 GB hard disk

I have not tried to migrate yet. I don't know how to and if I can so i thought I'd see if anyone has done such a thing here.

Thanks for you help again.