Inexpensive reliable RAID 1 card

[Scootel2]

Can someone please recommend a inexpensive reliable RAID 1 card? The card will be in a home environment where I would like to store music and pictures.

Thanks

 

[night_2004]

I don't see why software RAID wouldn't be good enough for this sort of application...

 

[Scootel2]

Thanks for replying night_2004. This is a Windows 7 box where the motherboard does not support raid. Can you explain what you mean by software raid?

 

[Neb]

Thanks for replying night_2004. This is a Windows 7 box where the motherboard does not support raid. Can you explain what you mean by software raid?

It's a bit self-explanatory, hardware raid uses a piece of hardware to implement the raid (raid card) whereas software raid uses a piece of software to do the same thing (generally via OS)

How to:
http://buildegg.com/bewp/?p=44

IIRC, mirroring is only supported in Win 7 Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate

 

[gjs278]

software raid would be your motherboard raid, or a raid card that just offloads all processing to your cpu but still manages to create and manage the array for you

you will need a raid card, but it will be a cheap one that is not dedicated. probably one of the rocketpoints will work, but I have no idea which one will be capable of a bootable raid1 array.

 

[night_2004]

Depending on which edition of W7 you have, software RAID can be done at the OS level without any additional hardware.

 

[Scootel2]

Unfortunately the box is Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Any suggestions on a raid card?

 

[shftup]

here is one for 59 bucks
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115075
Supports everything u need.

 

[gjs278]

Depending on which edition of W7 you have, software RAID can be done at the OS level without any additional hardware.

you wouldn't be able to use that as your boot partition though, it would have to initialize the raid1 before getting into windows, and it can't do that if windows exclusively controls the raid

 

[Old Hippie]

Unfortunately the box is Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

I learn something new everday.

I had no idea w7 home premium didn't support RAID1.

here is one for 59 bucks
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115075
Supports everything u need.

Looks good.

 

[night_2004]

you wouldn't be able to use that as your boot partition though, it would have to initialize the raid1 before getting into windows, and it can't do that if windows exclusively controls the raid

True. But an OS image / backup and a little partition management can mitigate the risk of problems lasting longer than the time it takes to restore an image. Depends on what your needs are if something like that would work.

I learn something new everday.

I had no idea w7 home premium didn't support RAID1.






Looks good.

I didn't realize that either.