Question Motherboard RAID or Windows 10 RAID ?

[spflanze]

I am about to do a clean install Windows 10 Pro in an old computer. The computer has a Gigabyte GA-970A-D3P motherboard, and two hard disk drives. There is no SSD.

I desire the installation to have the two disk drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration. I see there are two options:

1) Follow the directions in Chapter 3 of the manual at: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-970A-D3P-rev-10/support#support-manual . The drives will be RAIDed on the motherboard level.

2) Follow the directions for Windows 10 to do it such as at: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-set-up-raid-windows-10,36783.html . The RAIDing will be handled the Windows 10 OS.

What are the the advantages, and disadvantages, of each of these ways?

From what I can see option 2 means installing Windows 10 on one of the drives, booting Windows 10, and then raiding is done with second disk drive in the booted Windows 10. When RAID is done this way does the Windows 10 OS copy itself into the second disk so that the computer will still be bootable if the first disk drive fails?

 

[USAFRet]

I desire the installation to have the two disk drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration.

Why the RAID 1?

 

[SkyNetRising]

What are the the advantages, and disadvantages, of each of these ways?

Do not RAID OS drive.

With motherboard raid - if motherboard dies, your raid dies also. May be very hard to recover.
With windows raid - OS can not be installed on RAID volume.

Just get an SSD for OS drive. There's no reason, to not get one.

 

[spflanze]

Why the RAID 1?

So the computer will keep running if one drive fails, and make it necessary to send the failed drive to a data recovery specialist. If RAID 0 all data is lost if one drive fails.

 

[spflanze]

Do not RAID OS drive.

With motherboard raid - if motherboard dies, your raid dies also. May be very hard to recover.
With windows raid - OS can not be installed on RAID volume.

Just get an SSD for OS drive. There's no reason, to not get one.

 

[spflanze]

"With windows raid - OS can not be installed on RAID volume."
Does this mean the OS is not copied to the newly added mirrored drive?

 

[USAFRet]

So the computer will keep running if one drive fails, and make it necessary to send the failed drive to a data recovery specialist. If RAID 0 all data is lost if one drive fails.

A RAID 1 is only good for the rare instance of a physically failed drive, and you really really need uninterrupted uptime.
If you can suffer through an hour of recovery from a real backup, the RAID one is not needed at all.


And with the RAID 1, there is no "send the failed drive to a data recovery specialist"
The system would run on the other array member, until such time as you could take it offline and swap in a new drive.

Does this mean the OS is not copied to the newly added mirrored drive?

You can't set up a Windows based RAID array for the OS drive, until the OS is installed. But after the OS is installed, you can't do the required reformatting needed to instantiate a RAID arary.

RAID, of any type, was never meant for the OS drive.
And RAID in general has been vastly overhyped for viability in the consumer space.

A RAID 1 might be if you were running a webstore, and unscheduled downtime == lost sales.
But any enterprise running their backend in a RAID 1 also has a real backup situation.

 

[spflanze]

In step 3 on on the web page: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-set-up-raid-windows-10,36783.html there is:

3. Type or paste ‘Storage Spaces’ into Search Windows.

That there is "Search Windows" has to mean there is already an OS installed, and a newly added drive will become part of mirrored raided pair.

Are you saying a RAIDed pair of drives cannot have a mirrored MS Windows OS if they are RAIDed by Windows OS after the Windows OS is installed?

 

[USAFRet]

In step 3 on on the web page: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-set-up-raid-windows-10,36783.html there is:

3. Type or paste ‘Storage Spaces’ into Search Windows.

That there is "Search Windows" has to mean there is already an OS installed, and a newly added drive will become part of mirrored raided pair.

Are you saying a RAIDed pair of drives cannot have a mirrored MS Windows OS if they are RAIDed by Windows OS after the Windows OS is installed?

OK..."Storage Spaces" in Windows is sort of a pseudo RAID.
MS's implementation of a RAID 1 mirror.

And in the case of a motherboard or OS replacement, 'recovery' is a major pain, if possible at all.

Again, this level of uptime fault prevention is rarely needed in the consumer space, protects against a small subset of data loss scenarios, and almost always done better with a ral backup routine.

Storage Spaces mirror or RAID 1 gives a false sense of security.

 

[spflanze]

I have had a disk drive fail on me.

I also had that GA-970A-D3P mother board fail on me when I was using it with a pair of RAIDed hard disk drives. What I did then was replace that board with a new one of the same make, and model, and used it with those to disk drives. This worked for the most part. The Ubuntu OS booted normally. Only one program had to be reinstalled.

I know that RAID 1 Mirror is not a backup. It is reliability by fault tolerance I seek.

 

[DSzymborski]

That does nothing a backup doesn't do better, safer, and more efficiently.

Again, you're seeking a RAID for a reason that is not a reason for using RAID. Now, you're obviously free to do that; my doctor doesn't like me eating spicy food because of my acid reflux, but I still do. But I don't expect him to tell me it's a good idea.

 

[USAFRet]

I have had a disk drives fail on me.

So have I.
960GB Sandisk SSD, 605GB data on it. Died quite suddenly.

Took about 90 minutes to recover all 605GB data from the nightly backup on the NAS.

 

[Misgar]

Back in the good old days of Windows XP (or maybe it was Windows 98) I set up bootable mirrored RAID on two drives using the "Press F6 and insert floppy RAID driver disc" option. I thought I was being clever, but eventually both disks developed faults.

Luckily, I recovered most of my files because the corruption was in different parts of each drive. What it taught me was multiple backups are more important that the false sense of security provided by RAID.

So saying I have three TrueNAS Core systems with 6, 8 and 10 hard disks in RAID-Z2. They all contain identical data and I have other drives, BluRay and LTO tapes with further backups.

 

[geofelt]

Since you have two drives of suitable size, why not use one of them as a backup drive?

And, with ssd devices prices coming down, it seems to me that you would benefit from using a ssd as your C drive.
Not only will everything you do be faster, a ssd device with no moving parts will be more reliable.

 

[Grobe]

What are the the advantages, and disadvantages, of each of these ways?

There is one disadvantage that applies to both methods - if you'r OS gets infected with crypto malware, the more storage connected at that time of infection, the bigger your loss will be - no matter if they was meant for "backup" or not.

 

[USAFRet]

There is one disadvantage that applies to both methods - if you'r OS gets infected with crypto malware, the more storage connected at that time of infection, the bigger your loss will be - no matter if they was meant for "backup" or not.

One of the many things that RAID does nothing for.

 

[Corwin65]

I'm convinced people just like to say RAID.