Raid Questions

[wooglin]

Hopefully a simple backgrounder, to supplement what I've found online so far. Forgive me if there's previous posts, but the search f'n is down.

Curret setup (main points I guess)
Asus P4R800V Dlx. mobo, with onboard SATA Raid (2 ports)
IDE 80GB Boot (master)
IDE 120GB Storage (slave) I call it storage, but its main duty is the recording drive for the PVR setup. It is partitionned 80gb for PVR and 40gb as space to back up the boot drive.
XP Pro install.

Can I install an 80gb SATA (1 drive) as raid 1 (mirror of the boot drive)? Or would raid only be supported between 2 SATA drives in this case?

Failing that, if I simply connect a new 80gb to the Sata interface, I understand that Win ME and XP have some kind of built-in mirroring functionality?

Or if all else fails, just hook up the SATA as drive#3 and use it as a back-up only drive, with a nightly mirror of the boot.

I'd love your input, thanks

 

[DaveFarquhar]

Windows XP has the ability to mirror disks; ME does not. You right-click on My Computer and select "Manage" and then go into disk management. After you convert the disks you want to use to dynamic disks, you can then add a mirror.

Doing this will prevent you from dual booting with Windows 9x/Me. It may also prevent dual booting with NT4 but I am less sure about that.

Whether you can RAID parallel ATA and serial ATA drives together will depend on your system BIOS. I would be very surprised if it allowed this, however. You're probably stuck with Windows XP's software RAID.

Dave Farquhar

http://dfarq.homeip.net