Question regarding mirroring... 1

[ShawnShady]

I am setting up a 1+0 RAID setup at home and I am not sure exactly how the mirroring works. I know that once the system is up if a drive fails it won't bring the system down. However, when I replace the faulty hard drive and reboot the system will it automatically go back to mirroring my data and restore all the lost data on the mirrored replacement drive?

 

[victorv]

hi,
if you have a hardware raid (a specific card that performs
redoundancy), is not the OS that peforms mirroring, fail,
and rebuilding: just when you give power and go over bios
checks, the card begin its work, without OS.

Also depending from the card, if it has the
"automatic fail-back" enabled, when you remove
the failed drive, (hot swap if it is allowed),
and put in the new drive, the card begins the rebuild
operation. You don't see anything at OS level
(you can see performance degradation).

About 1+0 architecture, it is called mirror+striping
and is the powerfull a. It combines the performance of the raid0 (striping, not redoundant) with raid1 (mirror).
You need almost 4 drives, and yu can use 6,8,10... drives.
With 6 drives, the card splits the data in 3 disks (by this
you gain performances) and then mirrors the data on the
3 other disks.

ciao
vittorio

 

[ShawnShady]

Thank you. Yes, it is a hardware raid and I am running 4 identical 750GB drives.

Is it possible then for me to start with a raid 0 and copy my from my existing single drive and copy it to the raid 0 drives before mirroring and creating the 0+1? If so, when I add the additional drives it will automatically begin to mirror the data?

The reason I ask is I only have 4 Sata ports which would all be occupied leaving me no way to get my data from my existing harddrive without purchasing additional hardware. It may take extra time but I don't mind doing it in stages if this is possible. I just don't know if once I activate the raid on my motherboard if I can have a single drive plugged in and use it. Thanks for all the help!