Questions about setting up Win7 RAID?

holzmann

Weaksauce
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Jan 20, 2011
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I will be doing some computer upgrades for my father soon. While his mobo has built-in RAID capabilities, I am wondering if I should simply use the Win7 RAID option? He does not game or anything. The most taxing thing he does is use Google Earth. Otherwise, it's just email and surfing. The purpose of RAID 1 would be to give him some redundancy. Critical backups are made to a USB stick.

My questions involve setting up RAID within Windows 7.

Please critique the following procedure:

1) Boot off of Win7 (64-bit PRO) DVD.
2) Partition HDD0 with C: and D: partitions, say 120GB and 200GB, respectively.
3) Install OS.
4) Install HDD1 (same make/model as HDD0).
5) Boot, go into Disk Management.
6) Create a mirrored RAID array with HDD0 and HDD1?
7) What happens next? Windows will automatically copy image of HDD0 onto HDD1?
8) Continue with installing drivers, updates, software, etc.

Parts 6 and 7 remain the most unclear to me at this time.

And the question remains, should I simply use the Mobo's RAID instead? Pro and Cons?

Thanks.
 
The mirrored RAID regardless of whether its done via BIOS or Windows 7 is that it will be restricted to 120GB. You need to have equal partitions to do it correctly... 160GB x2. Windows doesn't make a copy in the sense of what you're thinking. It makes an exact duplicate of the data on the 2nd "drive" & will always write the same data to the other drive whenever something is altered.

A note of caution though...


Wikipedia said:
Using 2 partitions from the same drive in the same RAID is, however, dangerous.
  • A RAID 1 across partitions from the same drive makes all the data inaccessible if the single drive
A 2 HDD setup is best for RAID 1.
 
I don't know if you can set your boot drive to be raid one through software raid. You would have to set it up through the integrated controller before you instal the OS.

What I want to know is, why have you chosen to do RAID 1 for this sytem? If you're looking for simple redundancy you may want to look at something like Windows Live Mesh instead. You can create a single folder in his documents, then sync that to Microsoft's cloud servers. If the PC fails, he'll be able to bring back down anything that was in that folder.
 
Don't know if the mobo raid support is really better but I think it is. Doing it through windows just makes it more fake I think ! You know, software raid is kinda of fake, and I'm pretty sure you mobo uses software raid.

Anyways, if you do it via the BIOS using the built-in raid controller, read below:

Let me tell you a word of advice. Finish your RAID business then start worrying about installing windows.

After your raid array is ready be it 0 or 1, you can install windows. Windows won't know how many drives are really there. It will treat your array as if it is one physical disk.

When you boot into windows, you will need to load the raid driver so that it can recognize the array.
 
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