Windows RAID 1 dynamic disk vs BIOS RAID 1

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OK well, recently I upgraded my motherboard and my RAID 1 array went to crap.

I am creating a new RAID 1 array and the drives are connected to the Marvell controller on my Gigabyte P55A-UD4P. There's a few options for this controller in the BIOS: RAID, AHCI or IDE.

Right now I have it in AHCI to try to recover data off the disks (successful, and yeah I had most of it backed up so this wasn't too awful) but you can also select RAID and set up a mirror/stripe on this partition.

The alternative is to leave the drives in AHCI only mode and set up a mirror in Windows. I've never done this before, but I'm wondering if anyone has some ideas on drawbacks/advantages of both?

My concern over using the Marvell controller is that the data on the drives did not appear to be such that I could "degrade" the RAID 1 array to individual disks and still have them show up in Windows as valid drives; if this is the case (more testing needed I guess but I've been working on the computer for days so I'm tiring of it) then I'd rather stick to Windows RAID in case I ever need to degrade the array and get my data off it.

If anyone has any feedback I would appreciate it; I googled/searched this forum but didn't find anything specific on this topic. Thanks.

 

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Generally all RAID can be accessed by booting Ubuntu, as it reads the metadata by various vendors and thus is compatible with most onboard and hardware RAID implementations.

One other unconfirmed but interesting fact is that windows may hide drives that appear to have duplicate Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). That will happen when you break up a mirror and the OS sees two drives which are exactly the same. In this case, connecting only one disk might make sense, to avoid any confusion on the OS.

As far as software RAID vs proprietary RAID drivers; the latter adds (official) boot support. Otherwise i would say there is little difference.

 

[spotpuff]

Generally all RAID can be accessed by booting Ubuntu, as it reads the metadata by various vendors and thus is compatible with most onboard and hardware RAID implementations.

One other unconfirmed but interesting fact is that windows may hide drives that appear to have duplicate Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). That will happen when you break up a mirror and the OS sees two drives which are exactly the same. In this case, connecting only one disk might make sense, to avoid any confusion on the OS.

As far as software RAID vs proprietary RAID drivers; the latter adds (official) boot support. Otherwise i would say there is little difference.

Thanks; in Win 7 the last time I degraded the RAID 1 array to two single drives, the disk management program gave me a warning message and said I could assign a different ID to that disk to mount it. It doesn't hide the drive, but the partitions are not available and the drive shows up as "offline".

I will probably try to format the drives as RAID 1 in the BIOS, then break it apart and see if that works to make 2 single drives. If it doesn't, I might still use it anyways as you mentioned to get boot support, although I'm not booting from the array so maybe it's not a big deal.