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Help with RAID setup

RedWagnum

RedWagnum

Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2007
Messages
615
So a couple weeks ago I picked up a couple of those Best Buy 8TB external drives they had on sale for $180. After shucking them my thought was to use them for my media storage, and move the stuff from my three 1TB drives to the 5TB drive that is my current media storage. My media collection is not huge - about 400 DVD and Blu-ray rips and probably about the same in TV shows. I also have a USB TV Tuner that will be recording to the media storage. Since the rips take so much time and effort to make I want to mirror the two 8TB for redundancy. The drives are 5900RPM WD Reds and will be running off of SATA 2 ports so performance is not important. They should be fast enough to supply 2-3 Plex streams without a problem.

My trouble is I haven't setup any kind of RAID since the WinXP/NT3/4 days. Can I just drop the drives in and use Windows Drive Manager to mirror the drives? (Windows 7 x64) IIRC, when I initially did the install on this Asus P8Z77-V LE Plus I set the Intel controller to ACHI mode. Will that create a problem for me using Windows to mirror the drives?

To complicate matters, I may later build a small ITX system to play the media server role and I'd like to be able to just move this pair of drives over to it. Might be running Win7 or maybe Win10.

Any tips or suggestions?
 
MRFSYS said:
external drives? Do you have a link to specs and a photo?

EDIT:

When you wrote "external" I first thought they were connected via USB cable.

Then, I kept reading and saw this ...

> The drives are 5900RPM WD Reds and will be running off of SATA 2 ports

Windows should support a "software" RAID-1, with no problem.

You just can't boot from a Windows software RAID array.
Click to expand...
Yes, the drives were originally in USB3 enclosures but have been removed for internal use (see linked thread in OP). So the controller being in AHCI mode will not be a problem?
Current system (in signature) has a 128GB SSD for the boot drive. If I build the ITX system, it will also have an SSD for the boot drive.

Riouken said:
Are you running windows 10 on that machine now?
Click to expand...
No, Windows 7 x64.
 
Most newer MBs have decent onboard RAID built in. If you want to keep it easy just look for the RAID 1 option, mirroring, pick the master and pick the Backup.
 
lcpiper said:
Most newer MBs have decent onboard RAID built in. If you want to keep it easy just look for the RAID 1 option, mirroring, pick the master and pick the Backup.
Click to expand...
My MB is an older Z77 based board. I don't recall if the MB directly supports RAID via the Intel PCH. The board also has a Marvel controller that supports RAID but being that it only has two ports and one of those is eSATA, it's kind of useless for RAID.

I ended up just dropping the drives in and using Windows to create a mirror set. Seems to be working fine but I guess I really won't know unless I have a drive fail.
 
RedWagnum said:
My MB is an older Z77 based board. I don't recall if the MB directly supports RAID via the Intel PCH. The board also has a Marvel controller that supports RAID but being that it only has two ports and one of those is eSATA, it's kind of useless for RAID.

I ended up just dropping the drives in and using Windows to create a mirror set. Seems to be working fine but I guess I really won't know unless I have a drive fail.
Click to expand...

We do controlled failover tests to ensure our systems work as designed.

Whatever it is that this Windows software RAID function is supposed to do for you, you should test it. Figure out how to recreate it in a controlled manner so you don't actually risk your system and data.

A backup that doesn't work is worse than no backup at all.

I can't say I am really familiar with Windows software RAID but the option you chose to implement has capability and limitations, everything does. Imagine how pissed off you'll be if you go three years and after a failure you find out that the Windows RAID configuration you chose to use doesn't even do what you thought it does.
 
Last edited:
Whether you use BIOS or windows to set up the mirror doesn't really matter. Mirroring is the one aspect of windows RAID I've had no issue with through the years and sets are readily recognized on other windows installs. for 7/8/10
 
There are some people who would disagree with you given how you stated this. Given that I have made statements myself that, well when challenged I had to admit were incomplete or quantifiable, I'd have to allow others the same wiggle room (y)

The first link is a bird's eye view of the differences or pros and cons. The second link is far more involved but has really good information on the subject.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/raid-hardware-vs-raid-software.html

https://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/14b2fd84-f7a0-4ac5-a07a-214123ea3dd6/0/4423_sw_hwraid_10.pdf
 
lcpiper said:
There are some people who would disagree with you given how you stated this. Given that I have made statements myself that, well when challenged I had to admit were incomplete or quantifiable, I'd have to allow others the same wiggle room (y)

The first link is a bird's eye view of the differences or pros and cons. The second link is far more involved but has really good information on the subject.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/raid-hardware-vs-raid-software.html

https://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/14b2fd84-f7a0-4ac5-a07a-214123ea3dd6/0/4423_sw_hwraid_10.pdf
Click to expand...

I pretty much SAID I , as in me myself and I

.

At the end of the day we draw on our own experiences and those articles have outdated information and are much more concerned with complex raid implementations... we're talking here, now , this moment about mirroring. RAID 1.

I'm not wiggling anywhere, a mirror stripe for a plex server storage drive using windows RAID 1 is more than fine in my opinion and using non RAID aware drives it's fairly forgiving of time outs that the chipset will often choke on.
 
Simplyfun said:
I pretty much SAID I , as in me myself and I

.

At the end of the day we draw on our own experiences and those articles have outdated information and are much more concerned with complex raid implementations... we're talking here, now , this moment about mirroring. RAID 1.

I'm not wiggling anywhere, a mirror stripe for a plex server storage drive using windows RAID 1 is more than fine in my opinion and using non RAID aware drives it's fairly forgiving of time outs that the chipset will often choke on.
Click to expand...


I said wiggle room. Look, I have little use for it, (my turn to use I :) ), because at work I am a storage admin, I don't use RAID on anything less than a full blown SAN / NAS setup unless it's hardware RAID1 for a server. Workstations depend on my storage for their RAID needs.

At home on my personal systems, I'm a gamer, my CPU will not be tasked and my RAM will not be utilized to manage software RAID.

But this is me, and now you know why I have my view.
 
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