Vista and Raid

[whitewolf32]

O.k. I have Vista Ultimate (32bit) running on an AMD AM2 Slot 64X2 cpu and Asus M2N32-SliDelux Mainboard.

The mainboard supports up to raid 5.

The question I have is my OS drive is well established (around 2 years old with 0 reloads of windows).

I am thinking of adding a raid 5 with at least 3 drives and leaving the OS hard drive separate while retaining all the data and existing OS environment. Then setting up a network backup client of some type to backup all the pcs on the network to the raid array, including the pc the array is on.

1. Is there a way to create the RAID 5 array without wiping my existing hard drive clean?


2. What would be reccomended as an inexpensive, but easy to use, network backup client for at home over a wireless network?

 

[whitewolf32]

O.k. I looked through My M/B manual and it looks extremely simple to build through the bios and the NVIDIA RAID configuration tools. So, with that thought in mind, my only question is how hard is it to get vista to recognize it? Is it as simple as downloading and installing the vista 32 Nvidia raid drivers and rebooting and bam it shows up as another drive letter?

I'm thinking about order 3 Samsung 1 TB drives to configure as the new Raid 5 Array. Does anyone know of any limitations of a 3 TB Raid 5 array?


The question still stands on backup options for network computers to the raid array.

Thanks,

 

[gimpy1]

As far as setting up the array, I don't know.

As far as backup options, I would recommend Acronis True Image. It is currently $15 on Newegg with rebate, which is a steal. It will let you schedule regular images of your other computers, allowing for easy recovery if one of your other computers were to fail.

Two things to consider (I have an almost identical set up. One computer with 4 HDDs, 1 for the os and 3 in raid used for backup among other things): 1st, if you do image backups of the whole drive, you will probably want gigabit Ethernet. If your backup image is 100gigs, then over 10/100 Ethernet it would take about 2.5 hours just to transfer the file. Wireless is much slower; I found it takes me about 12 hours to send a 100gig image over wireless G. Differential and incremental backup are just as slow. Even though they are a smaller file, they still need to scan the full image to see what changed.

Second, you may want to store the backup of the server's OS drive on another computer, not on the array. The beauty of the backup is if your OS drive fails, or if the OS gets screwed up, you can just restore from the backup. If the backup is on the array, you won't be able to access the array in order to retrieve the backup.

 

[sub mesa]

You shouldn't use RAID5 with onboard RAID; its not reliable enough. Use backups to ensure you're not losing valuable data instead.