Software RAID 1 in Vista?

[PokerGuy]

When you convert two drives to dynamic drives, does any flavor of Vista support software mirroring? I know you can set up striping and spanning pretty easy, but is mirroring not supported?

I hate using the 'hardware' version of raid built into the mobo, because if something happens to the motherboard, I can't take those drives and just plop them into another machine. I'm basically stuck to that mobo. Using windows software raid, you can just move the drives to another machine and import them.....

Am I missing something? How do people do mirroring?

 

[Boobs McGee]

It looks like you are out of luck.

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NoteOnly Windows Vista Enterprise and Windows Vista Ultimate editions support dynamic disks.

Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Enterprise editions support spanning and striping dynamic disks, but not mirroring. (Windows Server 2008 supports mirroring.) For more information about dynamic disks written for advanced users, go to the Microsoft website for IT professionals.

 

[Nothinman]

MS has never supported any form of redundant software RAID on their non-Server OSes.

 

[yinan]

By a controller card then, they are inexpensive for ones that can do RAID 1.

 

[PokerGuy]

Hmmm, ok so software raid is out..... If you set up two drives as mirrors using hardware raid and the motherboard dies, can you take a single drive of the mirror and just mount it on another machine as a "broken" mirror to copy the data and recreate a mirror array, or are you basically out of luck?

I mean, is there any purpose then to RAID 1 capability on the MB?

 

[Nothinman]

I mean, is there any purpose then to RAID 1 capability on the MB?

Sure, to save you from a drive failure not a motherboard failure.

 

[PokerGuy]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I mean, is there any purpose then to RAID 1 capability on the MB?

Sure, to save you from a drive failure not a motherboard failure.

Good point. The issue is that you can always replace a drive if it fails with another drive of larger (or same) size and be back up and running. If the controller (on the motherboard) fails, you are completely toast and lose everything unless you can find the exact same motherboard as a replacement.

So, you create a RAID 1 array to protect yourself against drive failure, but in doing so you create a new danger that if something happens to the mobo you permanently lose everything, 'redundancy' or not.

I thought there might be a way to take a single drive from a mirror set and put it on another regular sata or ide controller and get the data (something you obviously cannot do with a striped array). Is that not the case?

 

[Nothinman]

I don't disagree with you, I hate those embedded fakeraid controllers but you can't blame them for MS not letting you use software RAID1. And the reality is that drives fail a lot more often than motherboards, in fact I don't think I've ever had a motherboard or drive controller fail on me. But if you're really that paranoid then buy your motherboards in two so that you're sure to have a replacement of the same model and revision handy.

I thought there might be a way to take a single drive from a mirror set and put it on another regular sata or ide controller and get the data (something you obviously cannot do with a striped array). Is that not the case?

Not sure, maybe. I think most of those onboard fakeraid cards put their metadata at the end of the drive so it might work. Linux dmraid supports a lot of those fakeraid formats so I'd probably go that route when trying to recover data from one of those arrays.