So I buy two 3TB hard drives and plan on doing raid 1 for redundancy....not cheap mind you. Get everything going, go into Disk Management...and what? no Mirror option...strange. Look up on internet, little known fact, Windows 7 HOME is not good enough for supporting Mirroring, only Pro (though someone says they got it working on Basic). You know, **** MS...
Didn't have the option (probably have to switch channels) and my experience doing it through the bios/mb hasn't been good ones. I've found the software raid by MS to be faster and more versatile. I just have to live with copy/pasting...
Surely you can do it easily in the system BIOS/off the system southbridge. I've got 3 older PCs all running a mix of RAID arrays on them, one 1, one 0 and one 10, all no issues at all. Never tried doing software RAID, frankly didn't know you COULD in windows. This might help BTW: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...-support/ce0cc32a-de18-4443-b141-3bd484ebb46f
I've already read that and as it says, Windows 7 Home Edition doesn't support raid 1 via Windows (aka mirroring). It "supports" it by using other methods of software/hardware. And the raid via MB is known as "fake-raid" its a software version done through hardware that doesn't really exist. In most cases its actually slower and more difficult should your motherboard to go out to get working again on another system. "True raid" via hardware has dedicated chips to handle the processing, error correction, and so on...it is also expensive. So no I can't do what I want, software raid 1 through/via Windows.
So you are whining that MS won't give a a feature you want for free? Surely if you want the feature it has desirability and MS as a business who want to make money should charge extra for it? RAID is a hardcore feature, pay for it and get over it.
Several stupid questions.... 1) do you plan on a single drive +a raid 1 array??? If not you need 2 or 4 drives to make a raid 1 array. you see, it sets two drives or groups of drives as exact copies of each other. The theory is if one group dies, you can run off the other group. In my personal experience, when one set of drives is dieing, the others are close to the same issue. 2) Have you considered a raid 5 array, it requires 3 drives and only 2 drives worth of data can be stored. The third drive is for parity striping...basicly, it means if one drive fails, you can replace it and rebuild your array. 3) A raid 1 is NOT a replacement for a good backup solution. 4) Have you considered a real raid card???
1) I bought 2x3TB drives and was planning raid 1 (mirror) as a backup, meaning I have several hard drives and was going to backup files to the 3TB drive and with the Raid 1 it was going to be basically backed up twice. Since I can't do that I decided to use both 3TB drives as the main storage (each splitting duty for movies on one, episodes/games on the other) and using my 2TB (which was full) as the backup of the essential large files and smaller files on a 640GB (which also has a backup of Windows). 2) Yes, I would have liked to use Raid 5, however I could only afford 2 3TB drives and since it was only a backup drive with redundancy Raid 1 was what I planned 3) Yes, I know raid 1 as the redundancy OF the backup drive 4) Yes I considered it prior to buying the motherboard/cpu I purchased back in November, my last board was limited to 6 SATA slots and after looking at the costs of SATA expansion cards (and seeing many poor reviews of anything in my price range - including data corruption) I went with a MB with 10 native SATA ports and planned my 9th/10th slot SATA as my backup with raid 1 redundancy. My post was merely me being utterly pissed at MS for not including "mirroring" in Windows 7 Home and keeping it for Pro/Ultimate as if Home users aren't going to want to use it? No where when I purchased Windows 7 Home (at launch) did it say mirroring would not be included, you actually can't find it out on any advertising products, its only on random MS forums is the information found. So yeah, I wanted to vent.
320GB x2 WD 640GB x1 WD 240GB x1 Intel SSD 90GB x2 OCZ SSD 2TB x1 Samsung 3TB x2 Toshiba Samsung is original Spinpoint F4 before Segate started rebadging them and Toshibas are Hitachis (retail box says Toshiba, on the outside of the drive it says Hitachi).