Simple RAID Question

[imported_stevem]

A set of questions about basic RAID Mirrored (RAID 1) operation from a newbie:

Are the two drives separately accessible - i.e. are they assigned separate drive letters?

Also, if one of the drives crashes, what exactly happens? Does the system notify you
and automatically switch over to the other?

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve M

 

[oneshot47]

As far as windows is concerned, there is only one drive. One drive letter and such. Its all pretty much transparent unless something goes wrong. On my machine there is both the sata bios and a windows utility to repair a drive that fails. Basically it will either pop up during boot up or while youre in windows and tell you a drive has failed and asks if you would like to rebuild the array. At that point you either pop in a new drive and rebuild, or keep going with just one. Hope this helps.

 

[mauiblue]

Originally posted by: stevem
A set of questions about basic RAID Mirrored (RAID 1) operation from a newbie:

Are the two drives separately accessible - i.e. are they assigned separate drive letters?

Also, if one of the drives crashes, what exactly happens? Does the system notify you
and automatically switch over to the other?

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve M

One day when I was moving around some wires in my case, I accidently knocked one of the SATA cables out of its socket on the mobo for one of the RAID arrays I have (RAID 0). When the computer started its POST and such, the RAID bios displayed that the disk that was disconnected was nonoperational. The same happens also with the RAID 1 array. So the RAID bios would be your first indicator. BTW with a RAID 1 (mirrored) array if one drive goes south, the other drive still will work. When the defective drive is replaced, the RAID bios will allow you to copy all the info of the good drive to the new drive.