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Hardware Raid 1 (Promise card) vs. WinXP Raid 5 ?

Kwad Guy

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 1999
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I'm going to set up an older PC for use only as secure backup storage and archiving. I'm going to use a HP Kayak XW800 machine, stock it with a few identical IDE hard drives (and probably install a DLT 35/70 drive).

I was about to set it up as a Raid 1 box with a Promise Fasttrak TX100 IDE card.

But then I read this article at Tom's Hardware about how
easy it is to set up Raid 5 under WinXP...Now I'm thinking of of going that direction instead. I'll get access to a greater percentage of my hard drives (N-1, where N is the number of identical drives), and probably faster performance as well (though not that important for this box).

My question: What are the downsides of the WinXP Raid 5? (One question I have is that since enabling Raid 5 under WinXP requires modifying a few system files (see the Tom's article), would there be potential issues any time Windows downloads an update, potentially overwriting these files?

Thanks,

kwad
 

Kwad Guy

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 1999
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Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
I don't think you can boot off of a WinXP created RAID partition? With the controller you can.

I believe you are correct about that...

Kwad