• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Software RAID 1 (aka Windows Dynamic Disks)

  • Thread starter Deleted member 79192
  • Start date
D

Deleted member 79192

Guest
I have some very important data on my computer that is modified quite often. Therefore I see the best way to back it up as to use a RAID 1 array. I'm not exactly the richest man in the world though so I don't wish to buy an exact copy of my 120 GB HDD to back up my 40 GB of important data along with buying a RAID controller card and going through nasty BIOS issues and stuff. I happen to have a 40GB HDD on hand too. I read a guide online that simplifies creating RAID logical volumes by having you convert your HDDs to "Dynamic Disks" in the Disk Management module of Windows XP. It is also partition-based, meaning you don't need exact HDD sizes.

This is what I am unsure of:

Is it okay to combine a 40GB HDD of a different speed than the 120GB HDD I'm using now? What I would do is create a 40 GB partition on each drive (it being the only partition on the 40GB drive) and tying them together into RAID 1 in the disk management module. I am unsure of the speed of the 40GB HDD in question but I think it may even be the same speed (ATA100) with maybe a different spindle speed (5400 vs. 7200 RPM). I know that in a RAID 0 configuration, having exact same drives tied together is very important. I was wondering if that same scenario applies to RAID 1 configurations.

Thanks in advance,
- Matt

p.s. I realize all I'd need to do is add the 40 GB HDD to my system and periodically update it but I hate doing stuff like that. I like the convenience of a RAID 1 array and it's autonomousy.
 
RAID is not backup, nor is backup RAID. They serve different purposes.

If you get a virus, it will still wipe the data on a RAID array, if you accidentally delete a file, it will be deleted off of both drives on the array, if you have a flood both drives will still be killed by water, if you get data corruption from a brown out the data on both drives will be corrupt.

Don't mistake RAID for backup, RAID is for uptime (so that server's can have a drive replaced without having to shut down) backup is to keep your data safe.

RAID arguably makes your data more vulnerable as there is more that can go wrong.

So for your purposes, put the 2nd drive in there as a separate drive, and schedule a backup using windows backup, and burn important data to CD/DVD occasionally as well.

Here is how to automate (schedule) backups: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx

==>Lazn
 
Thanks for the info, but I already read over that in the RAID sticky thread. I was referring to having a backup in the case of a physical drive failure. It happened to my dad and he lost everything that was on his old 20GB drive. He only had it for about 3-4 years but it still crashed, so I wanted to be safe with my data. I'm aware that viruses and brownouts and floods and fires still pose a risk to my data, along with accidental deletion, but I'm fairly confident that I won't fall victim to any of those situations.
 
Matt Welke said:
I'm fairly confident that I won't fall victim to any of those situations.
Click to expand...

im sure a lot of people who lost data have said this. but you should still perform backups. a drive that is 3-4 years old is still pretty old in for any computer component.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top