DELL's data saviour

A little known fact about the DELL Vostro 220 minitower PC is that is includes a very effective hardware RAID controller that can be configured to protect your data from hard disk failure.

This is very effective in providing small businesses with some measure of data protection at a minimum cost. For just the price of a second hard disk drive in fact. And no software costs at all.

To configure this order your DELL Vostro 220MT with dual hard disk drives of the same capacity or install a second SATA disk drive yourself. Before you install Windows XP or Vista, go into the BIOS setup (F2 key), select Standard CMOS Features and then change the SATA Mode option from AHCI to RAID. Save and exit, and then continue the Windows installation as normal.

When Windows is up and running, install the Intel Matrix Storage Application from DELL's Application and Driver CD or download the latest version from Intel's website. Reboot and run this application. You should be able to select the Data protection option which will setup the two hard disks in RAID 1 (mirror) and after a couple of hours will copy all your data over to the second drive. Of course you can also select Performance which will setup RAID 0 (striped) for a higher performance disk subsystem without any data protection.

DELL's salespeople and website fails to inform you of this fact that for the cost of an additional disk drive provides an essential data security feature. In fact DELL charge a ridiculous amount for that second disk drive often over £100 even for low capacity models. Remember as well mirroring disk drives with RAID 1 is no substitute for a full backup.