Setting up raid 1

hux · 18 Sep 2011 at 22:55

What's involved, i have the intel driver installed, and my board makes use of two raid controllers, one for sata 2 and the other for sata 3.

What else is involved?

rpstewart · 19 Sep 2011 at 10:09

The first question is why RAID1? It's an availability solution, not a backup - all your left with is two identical copies of the problem you're trying to recover from. You'd be better off sticking the second disk in an external caddy and using something like Synctoy or Robocopy to keep a proper backup.

If you're sure RAID1 is what you want then it's pretty much a reinstall job:
1) Set the SATA controller to RAID mode in the BIOS
2) Create the array in the RAID BIOS - this wipes the drives so make sure everything is backed up
3) Reinstall Windows and apps as normal on the new array volume
4) Restore docs, bookmarks etc from the previously taken backup.

hux · 19 Sep 2011 at 11:22

Oh right so as simple as that.

My board has two controllers which should help things in the read department.

Plus i want raid 1 as i cba to do backups.

rpstewart · 19 Sep 2011 at 11:34

If you're not going to do backups then there's little point in expending the effort of using RAID1 because you're still unprotected from the majority of causes of data loss.

neil_g · 19 Sep 2011 at 11:38

indeed, the mirror of a deleted/corrupted file is, you guessed it, a deleted/corrupted file.