Question Set up RAID 1 with 1 used drive and 1 new?

[insanecolt]

Hey guys, so this thread was totally different but I decided to edit it rather than open a new one lol.
Any way, I want to set RAID 1 on my drives, I have one used drive which I need to KEEP all the data it holds, and 1 new drive which is where I want to mirror/dup my data to.
Will setting RAID 1 remove my existing data on the used drive?

 

[mdd1963]

yes....

RAID 1 is 'mirroring the two drives', i.e., identical copies, so that the loss of either causes no loss of data...;it's not just a little storage area or partition for a few spare megabytes of data...

If you need the data on your drive, move it elsewhere. One should always have 2-3 copies of anything truly needed...

 

[popatim]

Normally yes. both drives get wiped to create the array but you can create a 'Windows' version of mirrored drives without wiping the source.
Run Disk Management and Rt click on your source drive and select Create Mirror. Select the New HDD as the location for the mirror and Windows wil convert the drives to Dynamic and begin copying data over. So this may take a very long time depending on how much data there is to copy.

Lastly, In my experience Windows Mirror isn't very reliable. In a year of testing I did they failed 3 times (dropped out of sync) and had to be resynced/recovered. These same drives have had no issues in the 2 years since on a real raid card. Hopefully MS has improved the technology since win8

Lastly, if you are using this as a backup, then don't. No form of raid is a substitute for a backup. Get yourself an external enclosure and do a proper backup to it. end of rant, thank you for reading.