mirroring drives

[richw1234]

Hi there,

I have recently lost my O/S (XP Pro) due to a hard drive failure! Would it been possible to retrive the situation if I had mirrored the boot drive onto another disk, allowing me to contine using the O/S until the disk was replaced?

Your comments would be much appreciated.

 

[tf1]

Yes. You can do this in software, but it is best done by using a good hardware RAID controller. If you do this in software, you get an I/O performance hit because of the need to write the same data twice. If you have a decent hardware controller, it will be able to write to one disk whilst reading from the second disks, caching the second write until the second disk is free for a write.

Also, with software RAID, if the 'wrong' disk fails, you have to reboot the system to recover. With a good hardware RAID controller, the system will continue to run seemlessly when a disk fails.


Regards: tf1