Fresh install, RAID 1

[digitalfirefly]

I'm setting up a server and I have two 1TB SATA drives. I want to set them up in RAID 1. I'll be using Windows 7 Home Premium. Does anyone have instructions on how to do this?

 

[mcnumpty23]

do you mean hardware raid or software raid?

 

[digitalfirefly]

Software RAID

 

[mcnumpty23]

Using Windows software RAID

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 all offer software RAID which is a more than viable alternative to hardware, and easy to implement. Which levels are available with depend on your flavor of Windows

The basic procedure for implementing Windows RAID is as follows:

1. Open the Start Menu, right-click on Computer and select Manage.

2. Scroll down the tree on the right to Disk Management (under Storage) and click on it.

3. Right-click over the large drive icon to the left for operations that will affect the entire disk (extend, stripe, mirror, or RAID 5). Only what's available on your version and possible with your disk setup will be enabled. For some levels, a wizard will pop up. Follow the prompts. If the disk is not dynamic, this will automatically convert it.

4. On dynamic disks, right-click over a volume on the drive and you'll see an option to mirror that individual volume (Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows server OS's only).

Note: Depending on the amount of existing data, it can take an extremely long time for new Windows RAID mirrors to sync up, and disk performance will suffer till the process is completed. It's far faster to back up your files, create new mirrored volumes, then restore the data. If you do opt for letting Windows sync all the data, keeping Drive Manager open and on top will speed up the process.