In the past, my coworker said he's been able to use a mobo's SATA RAID mirroring capabilities to mirror an existing drive. He took a primary hard drive, which already had the OS and data, and mirrored it without having to wipe out the drive.
Is this ability dependant on the raid controller or the drive type (ATA/SATA/SCSI)? I always thought the drives would have to be wiped out because the mirroring process creates overhead on the drive. I was hoping to get a PCI RAID card, and a second hard drive (identical to the first of course) to build a mirror configuration, but I don't want to wipe out my primary data drive. (I know I'd have to load the RAID controller drivers beforehand.) Can it be done?
Is this ability dependant on the raid controller or the drive type (ATA/SATA/SCSI)? I always thought the drives would have to be wiped out because the mirroring process creates overhead on the drive. I was hoping to get a PCI RAID card, and a second hard drive (identical to the first of course) to build a mirror configuration, but I don't want to wipe out my primary data drive. (I know I'd have to load the RAID controller drivers beforehand.) Can it be done?