RAID 1: Retrospective

Goksly · 22 Apr 2009 at 16:53

Ahoy,
Just wondering if this is possible. I have a drive that I want to split into 3 partitions. When I've done all of my installs etc I want to install an identical drive as the first and set them up in RAID 1. The reason for this is I'm building a new PC and need the data off the one drive to be transferred to the new one.

So - is this possible and is it fairly easy?
Cheers!

FaceplantSi · 22 Apr 2009 at 16:59

Hi, I gotta ask why not just use some imaging software like Acronis?

Ben M · 22 Apr 2009 at 17:21

Take an image of your drive and put that on, don't mess about with RAID, taking an image is a better way of doing it.

Goksly · 22 Apr 2009 at 18:14

But that means I need to take the image every week or so to keep it up to date, where as raid does it automatically?

philjohn · 22 Apr 2009 at 19:02

You should be able to do what you want. You'll need to setup the initial drive as being in the array and then hot-add the 2nd drive when everything is copied across. Your RAID chipset allowing you to do that is another matter though!

As others have said, don't rely on RAID as a backup, it's for redundancy, not backup (if you corrupt a file, it's corrupt on both drives in the mirror). I have an external HD and an online service (JungleDisk) that I use for important files. Most things though are already offsite (source code for work is on a remote SVN server, email is stored on a corp IMAP server etc. etc.), it's mostly things like family photos etc.