Duplexing Question

Nix

Nix

Soldato
Joined
26 Dec 2005
Posts
19,841
Guys,

I'm looking to buy another 3TB HDD to mirror an identical drive in my system.

The questions I have are these:

1. The current HDD already holds data. Would hardware or software mirroring erase this data? Am I able to set up a new mirror without any issues?

2. Hardware side: My mobo is a Gigabyte Z77-D3H, meaning I have 4 x SATA-II and 2 x SATA-III controllers.

My current storage is:

1 x SSD 6/gbs (boot) connected to SATA-III
1 x 3TB HDD 6/gbs connected to SATA-III

1 x Optical connected to SATA-II
1 x 500Gb HDD connected to SATA-II

I read somewhere that to implement the mirroring at a hardware level, I would need to have the discs on the same controllers, e.g. both on SATA-III or II, not III and II.

The problem I have is I'm unsure of how feasible this is as I wish to keep my SSD boot on SATA-III, meaning everything else would be on II.

Does anyone know if there would be a hardware conflict if I were to for example have the SSD and optical on both the SATA-III ports and the two 3TB HDDs I wish to mirror, and the 500Gb HDD (which wouldn't be part of the chain) all on the SATA-II? Would I be able to mirror with a non-chained device on the same port level?

Indeed, is there actually any substantial difference in terms of the boot speed if I were to move my SSD over to the SATA-II?

TIA.
 
Last edited:
I recommend an excellent file mirroring program called Bvckup 2. It's not free, but not terribly expensive. Does close to real-time replication, using differential copies, volume shadow copies (if required to copy an open file), and is extremely lean and very fast. You can enable an option to keep archive copies, which is one step better than mirroring which will happily mirror any deletions (e.g. human error) or file corruption.
 
What's wrong with Window's software RAID?

Will I be able to set up a simple software RAID 1 with Windows 7 for the two 3TB volumes whilst plugged in to a SATA-II port along with another volume on the SATA-II which I don't wish to be part of the chain?

Will creating a new mirror cause me to lose my current data?
 
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