Windows 7 - Raid 1 Controller Card

[murraj2]

Planning on doing a clean install of Windows 7 on my desktop and would like to just buy two 1 TB drives and set up in Raid 1.

Looking on Newegg the only Raid Controllers that list Windows 7 as supported are the Highpoint 2600 value series, which has a pretty short compatibility list(http://www.highpoint-tech.com/PDF/Non-IOP%20Compatibility_List.pdf) and doesn't include my current motherboard (MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard).

The Newegg comments indicated that Highpoint support won't do *** for you if you're using anything that doesn't include their supported devices.

So what are my best options? This is my first time attempting to configure RAID of any kind and I'm looking to spend less than $100 on the controller and less than $100 per HD.

I know Windows 7 does Software Raid, I've got a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz processor, what would the performance hit be?

While most of the Raid controllers on Newegg don't list Windows 7 compatibility, maybe that just doesn't matter?

Is there any way to set up Raid at a later time (as in install Win7 on one of the 1TB drives and then later buy a controller and attach another TB drive)?

 

[sub mesa]

Please, tell us first why you want RAID, what kind of benefit you think you'll have by using it, and what kind of disks you're going to use.

Also, i assume you're talking RAID0 (striping) here?

You shouldn't need hardware RAID in most cases, in fact using RAID0 with Intel RAID drivers and 'Write Caching' option enabled, may yield higher performance than hardware RAID for desktop users.

 

[sub mesa]

Sorry misread, you want a RAID1. I would really love to know why, since for consumers a backup offers much more protection, and uptime protection is something only the server industry will value greatly. So in your case a RAID1 may not be the best option. I'd need more information to comment in more detail though.

 

[murraj2]

I mentioned it in the original post, but I'm looking to do RAID1 with 1 TB (or possibly 1.5TB) HDDs (which also haven't been bought yet).

The reason I want to go with a RAID set up is purely for backup, so that if the primary drive should ever fail, I won't have to worry about spending time recovering and can just get a brand new drive to replace it.

 

[murraj2]

It's very possible too that RAID is overkill for what I need, but my goal was for easy recovery should the HD ever fail. If I use an option like Mozy or even the Windows Backup to a separate internal HD, then if the primary HD fails I'd need to reinstall windows and all applications on a new HD and then just copy over all the files.

But I'm very open to suggestions and it's very likely that a solution like Mozy is all I need.