Setting up raid 1?

Thats a rather vague question.

Do you have either Raid capabilities built into your motherboard or a seperate expansion card, you can do it through windows but its pretty awful as there is a lot of overhead.
 
Energize said:
Yes my mobo supports it.
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Read the manual then, all should become clear.

RAID1 isn't going to offer a considerable, if any, speed improvement. If the controller's good, read speed might be increased by reading a bit off each disk, but write speed is going to be either the same or probably slower.
 
Energize said:
How do I go about setting up a raid 1 array? I have no idea, I need to improve the transfer speeds you see. :p
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RAID1 won't give you any improvement in transfer speed, it gives you data redundancy by mirroring the data across 2 hard disks.

You may be thinking of RAID0 which stripes the data across 2 disks, half on one and half on the other. This yields an increase in data transfer as each block of data comes off an alternate disk hence disk one is transferring data while disk two is finding the next block. There is of course the big downside that if one drive fails you lose ALL the data.

As for setting it up how to do it depends on your mobo, later versions of NVRAID will allow online array conversion which might let you go from a single disk to RAID0. For everything else as far as I'm aware it's a total reformat and reinstall job.
 
Ive read there is supposed to be speed improvements because the controller can read off both drives simultanously so each drive is transferring half the needed data at its full speed, giving a big improvement in read transfer rates.
 
Energize said:
Ive read there is supposed to be a read improvement because the controller can read off both drives simultanously.
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Some can, not sure if the cheap onboard stuff would.

Some of the onboard ones allow RAID0+1. It has the benefits of both - a RAID0 array, but both drives are a pair of RAID1 mirrors. Bit of a waste of 4 discs, but should be quite quick.
 
Yeah mine apparently supports 1+0 but I cant afford another 2 drives and its a little much for my needs. Well Ill read up about the controller used on the mobo and maybe buy a better one if needed and it doesnt cost tons.
 
csmager said:
RAID1 isn't going to offer a considerable, if any, speed improvement. If the controller's good, read speed might be increased by reading a bit off each disk, but write speed is going to be either the same or probably slower.
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Not true, you can increase read performance significantly as you are reading from multiple disks at once, yes if you are using a single controller you might not notice a huge difference but if your using say two controllers and a disk on each controller youll then start to see big advantages.

The most effective version of Raid 1 is Raid 0+1 although not technically a mirror it allows for striping and mirroring, unfortunalty you need 4 disks minimum to attain.

Energize said:
Yes my mobo supports it.
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MKotherboard model? But anyway yes its rather simple to setup as long as you have two identical drives using the same specification IE: Sata/IDE/SCSI running at the same bus speed.

Raid is normally configured at the BIOS level by using a utility normally provided upohn booting the system, you should be able to select which drives you would like to include in the array, there stripe size and whether or not intialize them or not. As mentioned your manual will have more detailed instructions as setup varies between vendor.
 
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so if I am setting up a RAID 1 array . . .

where one of the identical disks already has windows on it - what happens??

Do I have to reinstall everything or will the system copy from one on to the other???

Can I have a pair of drives and just use them as data drives??


All good questions for the RAID DUMMY!!!
 
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