Prepare Raid After Windows is installed

[xionhack]

Hello. Currently I have a server with Windows Server 2008. In that server I have about 7 Hard Drives of 1 TB each one. Im not using any type of RAID and I dont know how to do it. The computer was build by myself so its not from a particuallar vendor. IS there any way for me to Raid them now even though none of the hard drives are empty. I want stripping with redundancy. Is it possible? Thanks

 

[mrdenny]

Odds are you'll need to buy a RAID card.

As there is already data on the disks, you'll need to backup the data to another machine before setting up the RAID array as creating the RAID array will wipe the disks.

You are looking for RAID level 5 which requires at least 3 disks.

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[kmcferrin]

If you're feeling really crazy you can run with software RAID. You would configure it in the Storage MMC. I have found that disk performance (using commodity disks) is usually comparable to that of a RAID controller. The only problem is that CPU utilization is higher using software RAID versus hardware RAID, especially when using parity-based RAID like RAID5.

Unless you're willing to shell out several hundred dollars for a RAID5 card, you'll be using CPU resources for parity calculations anyway.

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