Booting from a Windows 7 software stripe

[TerryMathews]

Hi everyone!

I wanted to put a feeler out here and see if anyone has tried this before. I have a pair of SSDs coming next week and I'm going to try an experiment.

Common knowledge, and everything I knew said that you can't boot from a dynamic drive in Windows XP or Vista or 7, which meant no booting from a software stripe. Recently, I've come across this article which gives a series of commands that should allow Windows 7 setup to boot from a dynamic disk.

I've also read a few things online that suggest that winload.exe lives on the System partition at the front of the drive, and it is capable of reading a software stripe on boot.

This may fail, I don't really know. Has anyone tried before?

My goal is to stripe a pair of SSDs using the Windows 7 software RAID so TRIM still works. My motherboard isn't new enough for Intel RST to support TRIM.

 

[TerryMathews]

Follow-up: Setup will simply not install to the drive. It could see it though.

Got the feeling it might work if I copied a Windows installation to it and then used bcd to point at the right volume. More work than I wanted to go through with a Windows 7 setup though so I switched my Intel ICH to RAID.

 

[razel]

I tried exactly what you wanted to do before and failed. The closest I got was installing Windows onto a smaller partition, then after installation, create the Windows software RAID stripe and install apps/copy all your data onto that. It was fun, but COMPLETELY not worth it.

SSDs are plenty fast as-is. Sequential speed is like maximum speed. When you bench that you are getting 1GB/s it does not mean that when you are need 100MB of data that you will get it 4 times faster than if you benched 250MB/s. It's all about latency and with RAID, you tend to average out the latency.

By the way the article you linked to seems to mention Win7 Pro and Ultimate only. I'd love to try it whatever they suggest but it's currently not loading.