Raid 1 with PATA and SATA drive ???

[Nils]

Hi,

Is it possible to create a RAID 1 setup with two 500GB drives, one being PATA and the other SATA? Are there any eventual problems/errors that can occur?

Thx for any advise

 

[geofelt]

I suspect not. But---
The value of raid-1 for protecting data is that you can recover from a hard drive failure quickly.
It is for servers that can't afford any down time.
Recovery from a hard drive failure is just moments.
Fortunately hard drives do not fail often.
Raid-1 does not protect you from other types of losses such as viruses,
software errors, operator error, or fire...etc.
For that, you need EXTERNAL backup.
If you have external backup, and can afford some recovery time, then you don't need raid-1.

 

[Nils]

I want to make a backup drive for four computers on a home network where everybody can backup their important data.
Right now I use an external USB HDD for it, but the problem with it is that I cannot switch it off at night or I have to re-activate the share every time I start up the PC.

 

[lotussama]

Yes, you can do it, but it would need to be a software RAID set up through Windows Disk Manager.

 

[geofelt]

What you might do is just use a single non-raided drive for shared backup, and then periodically back up that to an external usb drive.
A more expensive approach would be to invest in a NAS server. If you have an old pc, you might be able to use that as a NAS server.

 

[zenmaster]

Yes, you can do it, but it would need to be a software RAID set up through Windows Disk Manager.

Thumbs Up because yes you can do that.
But..............
No way I would use a Windows Software Raid :>

 

[kg4icg]

You cannot do a raid 1 using a sata drive and a ide drive even though they are the same size. It's either you do a sata raid or an ide raid. It will not work with mix bus types. Your motherboard manual should state this if you have read it on the raid section. I know mine states it when I had a Asus P5l
D2 which had both a sata and ide raid setups. They are incompatible.

 

[bobbknight]

Buy another Sata drive and do it easier.

 

[MrLinux]

Or buy a SATA to PATA adapter...

 

[Nils]

Well buying another one would not be a great problem as these drives aren't that expensive anymore.
Then I would use my 250GB SATA main drive and a new 250GB SATA drive to get the RAID set up. So I will need a new main drive to run Windows from. I've already though of partitioning the new one just like the old drive and then clone the primary active partition with Snapshot. Is that a good idea? There's only one problem: restoring an image made with Snapshot will turn your new drive into exactly the same condition as the old partition the image was made from.
This means if you make an image of a 30GB NTFS active partition and restore it to a 50GB NTFS non-active partition, that partition will suddenly be only 30GB large anymore and set as active! So does anyone know how to prevent that issue?