Possible/necessary to prepare for RAID 1 w/only 1 disk in hand (Asus P5W-DH, btw)

[scottt732]

Hi,

I'm trying to build a RAID 1 array with 2x 500GB drives... It seems like far too much data to trust to 1 drive & I don't have the means to back it up. The only thing is that I can't currently afford the second drive. Is it possible to set up the drive for mirroring without having the second drive in the system?

I'm using an Asus P5W-DH motherboard, so there are quite a few options controller-wise: Intel ICH7R South Bridge / Matrix Storage, JMicron JMB363, or Silicon Image 4723 Hardware RAID (ASUS EZ-Backup).

I'm assuming that the RAID arrays store their configuration information on the drives. That is, if I don't set the system up as a RAID array now, I would have to destroy the data to build the array at a later date. Then I'm back to the not having 500GB of extra space to store the data in the meantime. If I'm wrong on this, and the RAID info is stored in NVRAM or something like that, can I turn a single JBOD into RAID1 w/o losing the data?

Scott

[Sparkyy]

No you can not run one drive and then just throw in a second drive and form RAID 1. You have to start RAID 1 with two hard drives when you want to create it, which means you need two hard drives now if you want to do it now. RAID 5 and 6 you can add drives at any time but not with RAID 1.

[RavenD]

I believe on some controllers you can create a Raid-1 array without having to reformat the drives, thus if you already have data on one of them, it would just mirror it to the other drive.