Using Windows 7 to create a RAID setup.

[johnhawk]

Hello,after reading an advanced book about Win 7, I see that it can be used to create a mirrored RAID setup; this seems very attractive to me, but I have heard that a software RAID setup is not a good idea and a hardware system is far more reliable. Can anyone comment on this possibility, and if it is a good idea to use Win 7, talk about how it's done. Thanks in advance.

 

[sminlal]

The biggest problem with using Windows itself to do RAID is that you can't do it with the system disk. This is because your BIOS is set to boot from only one disk - if you have a mirrored pair of disks and the boot disk dies, then you can't boot.

An advantage of using Windows for RAID is that the RAID set will be portable across different systems - if your motherboard dies and you have to connect your disks to a different system, you don't have to worry about finding one with compatible RAID hardware.

Most modern motherboards use the Intel ICHxx chipset which supports RAID through Windows drivers. This is also software RAID in the sense that the work is done in the OS drivers and not in the actual hardware, but it has the advantage that it's smart enough to support booting from a RAID set even if one of the disks has failed.