Resolved Removing Stripe on dual hard drives

I am about to buy a new iRush PC from Novatech as I like the spec of the machine. At the moment I have no interest in gaming and I would prefer to have the two 500gb drives NOT striped together. If one HD goes down then I will not loose everything. I have always preferred to run a slave HD as a backup. I can also then add a bigger SATA HD from my XP machine (10 years old) once I am sure the new one can do all I require of it, with some of the old programmes in XP Mode.
Prior to installing W7 on the new machine ( I understand it has to be done before instillation of the OS) how would I alter the BIOS settings to remove the stripe, as I am told it is not complicated?
Blow by blow would be of great help.
I like to get this sorted in my mind before I spend the bucks and find it can't be done,
Thanks in advance
Regards
David D

 

Sorry Steve, that just shows my lack of understanding.
I thought two hard drives "striped" had information written to them jointly, or partly to each, as if they were one hard drive, so if one failed the info on both was lost. (even though this arrangement gave performance benefits).
I wanted the set up a new PC (without a pre-installed OS) to have a master Hd Drive with OS and programmes/my Documents etc on, and a slave Hard drive I could back up to, or keep my Hol videos on etc.
I presumably have to disable the raid BIOS (how?), then install Win7 to give me a PC with a master and a slave HD which have seperate drive letters. Perhaps I still haven't understood properly? Any clarification would be welcomed.

 

Thanks Steve. I learn a little more about these PC's every day.
Sounds straight forward, so thats another concern out of the way,
Will mark as resolved but may come back to it once the PC is purchased.
Thanks for your time,
Regards
DD

 

I suppose you don't want to backup anything from the old drives, because if you want to do it the time to do is now.

When you install your hard disks in the new computer, the computer would see both the drives as separate individual drives. It doesn't has any idea of RAID or JBOD until you tell it in BIOS. So you can install your disks & forget all about RAID.

 

Thanks rsinfo,
the new pc comes with 2x 500gb hd drives striped together. I had planned to "unstripe" them, run them with two diff drive letters. Does what you say mean that I could add my old sata 750gb drive into a third bay, and then I would have the two striped hd drives as C (1TB) and my old 750gb as a slave (?D) That would be an ideal situation for me if the BIOS can be set up to accept that arrangement,
Regards
David D

 

Thanks Steve. It took a while to clarify how things worked, but my last post seems to be the perfect solution.
Thanks for everyones help and time,
Regards
David