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Setting up Raid 1 within Windows

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I saw in disk management that it may be possible to setup software Raid 1 mirroring within Windows 7. Has anyone done this? Was it successful? I'm curious, because I've always just setup my Raid arrays via firmware. Thought this might be the easiest way to set up Raid 1 with an existing disk, without losing data. Anyone?
 
I've used windows software raid 0 for a couple years with no problems, back before raid was standard on motherboards. 2*200gb was nice and quick at the time.

So it works for Raid 0, I can vouch for that. Not sure if you use it for raid 1, if you can still use 1 attached drive from the set as normal. Also with windows raid you can't boot from a raid volume (0 or 1).
 
Also with windows raid you can't boot from a raid volume (0 or 1).

this is effectively the only difference between software raid and firmware/chipset.
 
I second his information. You can effectively use the RAID 1 software feature to keep your information mirrored but don't rely on it for mirroring of the OS.
 
I saw in disk management that it may be possible to setup software Raid 1 mirroring within Windows 7. Has anyone done this? Was it successful? I'm curious, because I've always just setup my Raid arrays via firmware. Thought this might be the easiest way to set up Raid 1 with an existing disk, without losing data. Anyone?

Well you have to convert the disks to dynamic disks before you can do this, so I believe you will loose all the data on the drive regardless.

I've done it, it never works out nicely. When a disk fails Windows can take foooorrrreeeevvvveeeeerrrrr to boot, don't know why, but it does. And when you replace the drive it won't boot at all until the rebuild process is finished.

I've also had a drive that had the SATA cable come loose. The machine was worked on for a few days before anyone noticed. When I went on site to fix it, I replaced the cable, the drive was detected, and stupid Windows decided that drive was the primary so it overwrote the drive that had days of new work saved on it with the data from the drive that had gone offline and came back online...:banghead:

Software RAID inside of Windows is not worth messing with at all.
 
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