My first raid, amd 760G bios etc confusing

[mikeford]

I put together a HTPC a couple weeks ago, Biostar 760GM2+ motherboard (AMD), Win7 installed on the first of two 2 TB seagate drives. System has been running fine for the last 10 days on the first drive, but today the second drive arrived and I have been getting noplace with making a Raid 1 mirror.

Win7 pro and at least 100GB of music and movie files are on the first drive, but all the options I have found look like all the data is lost. I assumed this would be just like replacing a failed drive and the new one would mirror and away I could go.

Do I need something running in Win7 to get this going?

Whats AMD Raidexpert?

 

[FishAk]

Just create the array, and then restore the images and data from your backup. You do have a backup, don't you? Because if you don't, you shouldn't be using a RAID array of any sort. RAID 1 is not backup, and if you treat it as such you will end up loosing data in time. So really, the simplest, easiest, and possibly the fastest solution, is to just create your array, and then restore to it from your backup.

http://www.paragon-software.com/landing-pages/WhitePapers/paragon_alignment_tool.html


When you have finished building your array, use this tool to align it for optimal performance.

 

[Emulex]

the management software matrix raid-1 has a mode you just add the drive to create the raid. make backups <---- #1 thing. trust me.

when your retail drives fail the raid you will be happy i told you to backup.

do not use consumer drives with raid anything but zero. some o/s (not windows) can deal with the timeouts better than others but i assume you are not doing a custom *nix based on your message.

 

[mikeford]

Nuts, pretty much my whole purpose was removing the need for doing a back up with Raid 1 mirrored drives. With 2TB drives nothing but more of them seems reasonable to use for a backup either.

Most of the data will be movies, either ripped from my own DVDs, or DVR files from cable that are watch a few times and possibly delete. OTOH my wife spent months ripping our collection of thousands of CDs to MP3 files, and that would be a PITA to repeat.

Are you guys saying Raid 1 is worthless?

I am using retail drives, Seagate 5900 rpm (green) ST32000542AS, but they have SMART active, is it all that likely both will fail at the same time?

 

[FishAk]

Not at all. RAID 1 writes to two disks as fast as your system can write two one, and it reads almost twice as fast, because it reads half the data from each drive. Also, if a disk crashes, the other disk will still have complete up to date data. If you can afford the extra space required, RAID 1 is great. It's just that it doesn't protect you from anything except for a failed disk. It's unlikely you will ever suffer a disk failure, so the one protection a RAID 1 array provides is unlikely to be required. Loosing both drives at the same time is exponentially even less likely. But it is a very real possibility. A fire could destroy both disks. The computer could be stolen, and you would loose both disks. If your RAID controller gets a wild hair, and starts writing garbage all over your array, it will write on both disks, and you will loose data. If a virus infects your system, and starts clearing out files, you will loose data. If your wife tries to save a file, but mistakenly deletes one, and it gets written over before you or she notice, you will loose data.


At $0.10 or less per GB of storage, drives are really quite cheap. You can buy an external drive for your infrequent backups, keep it in a fire safe, and put a third disk inside your computer for automatic everyday backup. You can also keep an image of your OS/programs partition on each of those drives, and if you need to fix your computer because a virus hit the OS, or you loaded a program that makes your system hangup, it's a simple procedure to restore the image. You will have all your settings, activations, updates, and whatever else you had at the time you made the snapshot.


But before you create the array, you need to have a good backup set. Loosing all your wife's work- or even a portion of it- &#8230; Well, believe me, you wouldn't want to go there.

 

[mikeford]

Every two weeks Tigerdirect has started a new $30 rebate that combined with bing drops the price of this Seagate 2TB drive to about $80 shipped. Cheap per GB, but still not cheap in the overall scheme of things, the whole HTPC less drives was under $200, so two drives doubled the cost, plus the time delay between rebates and shipping etc make a third drive more than a week away.

Short term I guess I have no choice but to back up the current Win7 install and data, make the array and restore.

Long term maybe I will buy a couple of 0.5TB or 1TB drives as prices drop, and cycle them one at a time with critical items backed up to an offsite storage.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Emulex]

(windows home server) in basement with gigabit link through house.

and still take things offsite as houses disappear.