3Operating systems and devices supported

Operating systems supported

HP RAID supports the Windows 8 operating system.

Devices supported

This section describes the devices supported for RAID migration, including the SATA drives, computers, and docking station. Device support is summarized in the following table and then explained in more detail below the table. External USB SATA drives connected to the computer or docking station cannot be used for migrating to RAID.

Primary and Upgrade Bay SATA hard drives in the computer

Primary and secondary bay SATA hard drives in the computer

Docking station hard drive or eSATA hard drive attached to computer

RAID 0

Yes

Yes

No

 

 

 

 

RAID 1

Yes

Yes

No

 

 

 

 

Recovery

Yes

Yes

Yes

 

 

 

 

RAID 5

No

Yes

No

 

 

 

 

HP SATA drive option kits

HP offers SATA drive option kits for the computer Upgrade Bay and the docking station's SATA- swappable bay to support RAID migration. For optimal RAID performance, it is recommended that both drives have the same speed. However, supported HP Business computers allow drives with different speeds to be used in a RAID volume.

Drives of different capacities are also supported for RAID migration, as long as the capacity of the secondary (recovery) drive is equal to or greater than that of the primary drive. For example, if the primary drive is 200 GB, then at least a 200-GB drive is required in the Upgrade Bay to create a RAID volume. If the capacity of the secondary drive is larger than that of the primary drive, the excess capacity of the secondary (or third) drive will not be accessible. If, for example, the primary drive is 160 GB and the secondary drive is 250 GB, only 160 GB of the secondary drive will be usable in a RAID configuration. Therefore, for optimal use, it is recommended that both drives have the same capacity.

eSATA hard drives (select models only)

External SATA, or eSATA, is an external interface that allows a SATA drive to achieve data transfer speeds up to 6 times that of a SATA drive using a standard USB 2.0 interface. The following illustration shows a supported computer with a primary hard drive (1) and an eSATA drive (2) connected to the eSATA port (select models only) to allow Recovery. Regarding the capacity of the

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Chapter 3 Operating systems and devices supported