I know this is 5yrs old, but I am surprised I haven't seen your videos until now. This likely works in Windows 11 Pro as well, so this will be nice to set this up. I appreciate your videos. Very well explained.
Very helpful. One small bonus tid-bit, you can quickly get to Disk Management by right-clicking the start button on your desktop on Server or Windows 10 :)
Thanks for this Gary, but there's an important factor that I would like to add. Sorry if it's been added already.. The partition 'Style' on both drives must be the same - either MBR (Master Boot Record) or GPT (globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Doesn't matter which, as long as they are the same.
Great video! As a followup, what happens when one of your disks crash? Is it a matter of pulling it out and letting the good one run on its own or do you have to either add a new disk to replace/resync the bad one right away for your system to work properly again? Can the system just boot up and run on the one good disk without the mirrored disk, or do you have to remove the mirroring?
I believe (not an expert) that if one drive fails, you’ll just keep rolling on the working mirrored drive. You’ll still be able to access the data, boot if it’s a bootable drive, etc., just no redundancy. If you’re using an NAS, they can designate a hot spare, which sits unused (on but no access), until a drive fails, then will be used to replace the mirror (R1) or whatever drive failed in an array (R10) automatically. Note that if using R0, you’ll need to restore from backup as there is no redundancy.
If a drive fails, shut to PC down, remove the failing drive, replace with another, then go through the mirroring process again. Not sure how you actually know if a drive is failing though.
This tutorial is fine, for a "D" drive. But I believe is not advisable for a "C" drive. If you create a software RAID 1 for your "C" (boot) drive, then if the original drive fails, you will not be able to boot up. Windows knows nothing about the RAID, until Windows starts. As such, the first/original drive will need to work, and boot, until Windows gets up far enough to start the software RAID 1. This will not be an issue, if you do your RAID via hardware, as your storage controller will be working and it is the controller that has the RAID info, and will boot from either drive. Cheers!
@[k]night Mirroring your "C" drive, via RAID 1, for the reason you specified is a very good idea. It is the implementation of the RAID that I wrote about in my initial comment. This video explains how to do a "software" RAID. In my opinion, that is not a good way to mirror your boot drive. The proper way to mirror your boot drive is to use a "hardware" raid controller (not "software", via your operating system). If you have a server, then you very, very, likely have a hardware controller that will support the common RAID modes (0, 1, 5, and 10, and maybe others). Most motherboards come with hardware RAID built in. I have not checked lately, but even my Asus motherboard, manufactured in 2006, has it built in. So you should definitely have a hardware RAID controller on your motherboard. In the off-chance that you do not, then an add-in RAID controller card will remedy that. And a RAID that is managed via a hardware controller will normally provide optimal performance. It will take zero resources from your CPU. With a software RAID, your operating system handles the RAID, and that takes CPU cycles. With a hardware RAID 1 (mirror), you still boot from only one drive. But your controller will keep both drives in sync. And if the drive that boots should fail, then your controller will let you boot from your other drive. With a software RAID, if your boot drive fails, then Windows will not start, and your RAID never becomes active, and your mirrored drive will not boot. Check your motherboard manual (should be available on-line) for RAID options. Also, upon booting up, you should see something like "Press F8 for RAID configuration", or whatever the special keys are for your computer. Cheers!
@[k]night A note of caution: Mirroring a drive is not a substitute for doing backups. If you mistakenly delete the wrong file, then a RAID 1 will delete that file from both of your drives. A disgruntled employee puts a virus on the server? Both drives are mirrored. You are out of luck. Unless... Unless you do backups, and you have them available to restore your server.
Nice video Gary! One thing that you should add is about the difference between doing in Windows and in BIOS, mentioning the advantages and disadvantages of both.
Well, I don't know much, but what I know is this: - Operating System raid is more reliable, you aren't tied to the hardware in case of a motherboard failure and it is much easier to rebuild the raid array. The downside is that it is a bit slower than hardware/BIOS raid. - Bios/Hardware raid is faster, you can setup before installing the OS and install the OS on it. The downside is that you are tied to that specific raid controller that comes with that motherboard, it might not be compatible with others.
@@gusgyn well, I think it's important to differentiate between the BIOS RAID ("fake RAID") and true hardware RAID. I recently setup and tested the exact same three drives in RAID5 using both BIOS/fake RAID on my Z690 motherboard and the Parity method in Windows. The BIOS/fake RAID had write speeds half that of the Windows software RAID. My mind was honestly blown.
Any advice, I am getting the following error message when trying to create a mirror of my C drive (virtual disk manager the disk could not be converted to dynamic because security is enabled on one or more partitions) both SSD's are brand new.
Hello Gary, thnx for this nice video. I have 2 questions: 1-) Can we do this RAID 1 mirroring with 2 external hard drives? 2-) How do we know if one of these mirrored drives fails (breaks down)? Thank you...
I have a computer with Windows 10 Pro installed. All of my programs and data are stored on this one 2TB hard drive. Is it possible to do Raid 2 on the entire hard drive without losing data even though the drive has the operation system on it? Thanks.
I'm sorry. I meant to say Raid1. When I attempt to follow your method to add Raid1 to a disk that is the boot disk, has the system files and my data, I get an error message saying, error message saying "the selected GPT formatted disk contains a partition which is not of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID' and is both preceded and followed by a partition type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID." Converting your disk from GPT to MBR as suggested by another you tuber did not resolve the problem. any advice?
Yeah, I deliberately showed how to do this on a data dusk rather than a boot disk as converting a boot disk to RAID isn't necessarily trivial. I am sure it is possible but I haven't done it myself. One way to play around with it is to create a Windows VM, add two disks and simulate your setup and see if it works.
Warning about Raid 1 that Gary did touch on. I was using a hardware raid controller. Mirrored don't need backup WRONG! Drive failed and scrambled data. The RAID dutifully mirrored the corruption. Lost everything.
How does a HDD scramble data? in a way that said scrambled data can be mirrored? Did you accidentally delete the files? Did a virus delete them? What happened?
i dont know why, but i have two 500GB drives, one from seagate and one from WD, and the add mirrir option for me is grey, even tho the WD is all unallocated. can anyone help?
Gary, I have win10 pro installed on an M.2 ssd and two internal hard drives mirrored (RAID 1). My win10 is corrupted and beyond fixing (actually nothing works to fix it), if I reinstalled a fresh copy on my m.2 boot ssd, will my RAID drives come back online .. without losing any data on them... when the new fresh copy of Windows 10 is up and running? Thanks in advance.
Dear Gary,I set up the Win 10 RAID 1 with two identical hard disks and it works ok. Then, one day, I installed a case fan into the case and unplugged both hard disks because they were in the way. Afterwards I turn on the PC and noted that disk management indicated that both hard disks were failed, i.e. without any disk allocation (it used to be D:/) . I needed to do the disk allocation to both disks which leads to both disks had to be formatted. All data in both disks lost. Luckily I had all data backed up in external hard disk.
I wish he had covered what you do if one of the disks dies and you need to rebuild the array. Does the system keep working normally? does it notify you? will you be able to just add another drive and tell windows to fix it or do you need something outside windows?
Those are good topics, but a bit outside of the "set up" theme for this video. It might be something I could so as a follow-up video. I will add it to my TODO list. But in short, of course Windows notifies you. It would be a bit pointless if it didn't. All you need to do is replace the broken drive and Windows will take care of the rest. It is trickier when you are talking about a RAID 1 boot drive, which is why I didn't cover that in this video.
Hi! Thanks for the video! I am doing right now a RAID1 in my computer but I failed at 4:33 with an error message. Why did you choose MBR instead of GPT? Is it possible to do it with GPT? Thanks a lot! Anyone? :)
Thanks for your video! After watching I came up with 2 questions: 1. If one of the drive fails, how do we know? Since there is only one D: showing in This PC and I assume as long as one hard drive is working it’s accessible. 2. We don’t need to back up for disc 1 before mirroring it right? Thank you!
Gary Explains reason I asked this was that doesn’t seem to work, I sabotaged a disk, pulled out the data cable, the remaining disk removed mirroring, and stayed a dynamic disk.. attached the drive, nothing.. couldn’t add mirror rescanned disk etc, not good.. didn’t reboot the pc though.. give it a shot
Hello Sir.. I am having one question... I have workstation having windows 10 pro.. currently not configured as RAID1.. Also I have installed my all the softwares and required files for programming.. So if I follow your process for RAID1 configuration, then will it be possible for mirroring?? And will it work successfully for my programming softwares??
1st of all, thank you. I recently got 2 3tb hitachi's after my seagate 2tb failed, and wanted to give raid1 a go because not having a back up sucks. Went into bios on my msi b350 gaming pro and enabled raid and set up the arrays. Everything looked hunky dorry but when booting into windows it would blue-screen and say that "Windows could not read from boot device" which happens to be a 500gb ssd. It seemed fine in the bios, the SSD as one array and the two 3tb's as another. But no matter what, it would bsod during some point of loading into windows. I went online to try and figure out wtf I was doing wrong when I stumbled upon this video. I decided to attempt this method,and after a bit of frustration , I got it to work. My issue was when windows was formatting the drives, they were set to MBR which apparently has a 2tb limit. Simply switching them to GPT let me progress without issue. I would rather have them working in raid1 from bios, but this way works fine for my needs. It's mainly only used for games and videos and I doubt there would noticeable performance difference between either method for loading games. I still have no clue what I was doing wrong in bios though. But oh well. Now if only there was a trick to retrieving data from failing drives, I've heard that sticking them in a freezer bag and freezing them overnight can work, guess we'll give that a go, but something tells me I'm not getting that 1.8gb on data back easily.
SynKron or other synchronizing software can be used to make automated backups of drives. Always keep 2 backups, ideally 1 offsite for anything important. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP
@@mrmotofy Its true its not a backup but it is more of a backup than no backup at all. Most people never keep up on automated backups and thus have to go to a 3 month old or older backup. Best is raid 1 or 10 to raid 10 backup to raid 10 offsite storage. Most people can't afford it and go to ghetto raid like unraid.
@@Physics072 That's why automated backups are important. SynKron and many others can do a scheduled backup. Syncthing is another good one I use for my phone/tablet. Get home they connect to Wi-Fi and poof backups my pics and data to my server. If I'm away from home on vacation etc, disable the Wi-Fi requirement connect to my VPN then poof it all backs up to server. So I lose devices my data is already home.
Tried this with 1Tb c:\ HDD with a 1Tb HDD as a mirror, but I get an error message "there is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation", no matter what I do. I tried a 2Tb HDD as a mirror instead, same problem. Windows 10 64bit pro. Is there another tutorial for bugfixes?
Hi Gary, a quick one- if you already have data on your existing drive, would it wipe out the data if you install another drive and configure them both as RAID 1?
No, it doesn't wipe out the existing data. That's exactly what he did in this video. He had about a terabyte of data on the old D: drive, and when he added the mirror it all got copied to the new drive.
Great video Gary. Will this still work if you use a USB HDD dock and after you complete the mirroring remove the HDD and use it as removable backup drive?
I set this up for my cold storage (like a nas built into my desktop) but I want to upgrade my PC and I am trying to figure out the best way to move this raid 1 array through the upgrade.. effectively a new computer and new windows installation.
Sir I have a question for instance that your drive C already have existing files and wish to add new hardrive as drive D. If you mirror drive C to D drives, does file C existing files lost? or rather automatically mirrors it as one drive.
working as a RAID/Storage QA for quite sometime, my suggestion to users is to go with same type of drive i.e rpm ,size,type :ssd,sata(however vendors can be different) this will not create bottleneck of performance during read ops.
Even if it's been a whole year later, thanks for this post. Paired with this video, I gained useful knowledge ... Kinda scary, for YT (lol), but appreciated!
1:05 describes RAID 0 Striping, not RAID 1 Mirroring. A mirrored drive writes to both drives simultaneously with the same data. That way if one drive fails you have a 100% backup copy. There's a way to mirror the boot drive so that all writes (including deletes) are done the same to both but booting and reading is done from the mirrored drive chosen (or defaulted to after a set time) at boot. RAID 0 Striping breaks data into chunks and writes and reads in parallel to all drives in the array. A problem with this is failure of any one drive results in total data loss. Only use RAID 0 when you need speed *and* either the data can easily be replaced or re-created, or you have a backup. RAID 4 is striped like RAID 0 but one drive in the array (a minimum of 3 drives are required) holds parity data which can be used to re-create the data from the stripe pieces on the rest of the array. If the parity drive quits the array can be set to "fall back" to RAID 0 until the parity data is rebuilt. If a data drive fails then you get to let it sit there and take the time to rebuild. Losing any two drives is almost 100% a guarantee of losing all the data. The chances of recovering anything increase with larger arrays and if the parity drive was not one that failed. RAID 5 is striped with parity but instead of putting all the parity data onto one drive it's distributed among all the drives. Like with RAID 4 the total capacity is one drive less than the total of all the drives. The loss of any single drive has the same 'penalty' of time required to rebuild. As with RAID 4 at least three drives are required. Unlike RAID 4 the loss of two drives may not be a death sentence to all the data. The more drives there are in a RAID 5 array, the more 'spread out' the data is, increasing the likelihood that many files won't have any pieces on the failed drive, and the possibility of using the parity data to re-create pieces that were on the failed drive. IIRC some fancy RAID controllers can re-create the lost data on the fly and allow it to be accessed while the data is being rebuilt onto a replacement drive. There are various modifications to the "standard" RAID types. For the highest cost + fastest speed + best security a mirrored RAID 5 is what to use. It has less than 50% of the total capacity available yet can recover from a simultaneous failure of one drive on both sides of the mirror, or anything up to a total loss of everything on one side of the mirror *plus* one drive on the other side. Recovery from that would entail replacing the single failed drive on one side, letting it rebuild, then replacing all the failed drives (or all of them just to be sure) then re-mirroring all of it. If a mirrored RAID 5 controller can make each drive on both sides 100% identically written to its companion on the other side, then it might be possible to swap drives from one side to the other in the event of multiple failures on each side that are not both in the same position. For example there's 6 drives on each side and 0, 3, and 5 fail on one side while 1, 2, and 4 fail on the other. A controller that can automatically fall that back to run as a regular RAID 5 would be very nice, especially if 6 new drives can be hot swapped in and it'll silently rebuild and switch back to mirrored mode when done.
@@GaryExplains there's no change in speed at all for a mirrored pair of drives. The same data is being written to two drives at the same time, for the sole purpose of not losing it if one drive fails. Every file is 100% present on both drives. RAID 0, 4, 5 and other methods that use striping (which RAID 1 does not!) get a speed boost for both writing and reading due to better use of the available bandwidth by splitting writes to two or more drives. If each drive individually can write large files at 100 megabytes per second, a 4 drive RAID 0 can (given a sufficiently fast connection) write that same file at nearly 400 megabytes per second - at the cost of losing the data if a drive fails. I've been in the business of computers since 1983. I know what's mirroring and RAID, and what you start describing at 1:05 *is not mirroring*.
LOL, you do understand that read and write are different operations and that different RAID levels offer different read and write characteristics. It is simply false to say that there is no read speed improvement with mirroring. I suggest you go back and understand these things. You seem to like to write verbatim comments as if somehow quantity makes up for lack of understanding.
Let me help you a little. So there are two disks, one a mirror of the other. When writing the data needs to be written to both disks. Great. But you are saying that during read operations only one disk will be used and the other ignored, even though the second disk has the same data on it, you assert that the disk will remain unused even when using it would increase the read performance. 🤔
@@GaryExplains reading exactly the same data from two drives cannot make it read faster. Striping makes reads faster because the data being read from each drive is different. It's interleaved like dual channel RAM. In a two drive array with 4k stripes 8k of data can be read in the same time as 4k from a single drive or a mirrored pair. The operating system (for software raid) or raid controller reads the different stripes from every drive containing part of the file and assembles them in the correct order. A mirror pair reads the requested data from point a to b. One piece at a time.
Once I did a RAID this way, and it was resyncing very often and also crashing to the extent that the second drive went out of the array. After a second such crash in 2 weeks, I gave up and switched to BIOS-RAID, and never had any problems since then.
Thanks for the video Gary. I followed your steps, however when I selected my new drive i got this error message: "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid." The two drives are identical and both listed as 465.76 GB NTFS file system. How do I manage this?
very helpful, thank you. I want redundnacy for some video and photos, and would hate to lose them. Good tip on different drives from different batches/companies. I wouldn't have thought of that.
I Gary great video, thanks a lot. I have W10 Pro installed in 1 NVME drive (C:) and a RAID 1 (2 x 4Tb HDD = 2Gb) as a backup (D:), all is up and running fine. If I need to reinstall Windows 10 Pro I still get access to the RAID 1 array and the files on it??!
This worked for a couple HDD's in my system. When trying to mirror the operating system drive to another drive, it's saying "failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date". I tried sfc /scannow, uninstalling drive and rebooting, shrinking volume of disk to be mirrored, and assigning drive letter via CMD (couldn't do this because no volume's found on disk to be mirrored to).
I've had this message on a very early HP (7-8 years old). But on a later model, (4-5 years old) it worked fine. I think it was the primitive HP BIOS that was to blame.
Sorry, it’s done with 100% healthy mirroring but when I disconnect one of the drive to check the status it’s shows disk 0 (foreign with the yellow symbol) and disk 1 (Failed Redundancy). Both 2 Tb hdd took 5 hours for Raid 1 to complete but after that the same problem at the time of experiment to see how we will find the data in absence of one of the disk failed. Help to know how to do it. Thanks
i have quesitons i have 2tb HDD , now it health show as caution so it mean i should buy new HDD okay? 1. i am planning buy new 4tb HDD and do raid mirror. can it do? 2tb raid to 4tb? 2. after raid my two HDDs. if unexpected way my 2tb HDD gone somehow. what happened to my 4tb HDD raid ? is it nothing happened? or i think do this way install 4tb HDD and create many partitions. and copy past previous HDD data? what do you think?
Yes and No. I believe all motherboards have a SMART notification or SMART Alert of a feature. That way you have two redundant notifications. One from Windows (which will notify you if a drive is about to fail) and one from the BIOS during startup. You could set up a task scheduler once a month to open CMD. Type "wmic" and hit Enter. Then type "diskdrive get status" and hit Enter. This will show you the drive health status.
Hello Gary, After watching the video one question emerges. Let’s say You have a hdd A. You install Win10Pro onto A. Then You insert hdd B. Is it possible to use B as a full backup of A. E.i.: is it possible to create RAID1 out of a system disk which is currently in use? Thank You.
You can use HDD A to mirror onto drive HDD B. I tried it. Works like a charm! I suggest getting a NAS with 4 drive bays and use RAID5 for mirror your files. Or that, get a server with RAID controller and get 4 or more drives and use RAID 5 or RAID 10
I have actually never tried to use RAID1 on a primary drive. Let's say I have a 1TB drive as my primary HDD. Can I put in another 1TB as a secondary drive to mirror my primary HDD? I also currently have a Dell Poweredge T30 with 2 HDD's but has no built in hardware RAID controller. But only used as a file server. I will be putting in a NAS as well with 4 drive bays and I may use RAID5 on that.
how to recover hdd after using storage pool on windows . i reinstall windows and the new windows can not see my old setup storage pool. i use easeus recovery program (and on preview i ca see and play any video but after i save data way less data is available) what to do ??? any idea
Hi, great video, thank you very much! A few questions:: -i think my motherboard (Intel DP35DP) supports RAID, is hardware or software RAID preferred? -what happens to this mirror in the event the OS gets a virus and/or needs to be re-installed? Does the mirror break? Does it need to be re-enabled or will it maintain? -can Windows 10 handle more than one RAID 1(mirror)? Say if I install 4 hdds? THANKS A TON!!!
- Motherboard RAID has the disadvantage that if you need to move the drives to a different machine (say because of hardware failure) then you need to find another motherboard which supports the same RAID setup. -The RAID can be added again to a fresh install of Windows. There maybe some re-sync/repair stuff that happens. - Yes.
many thank eng fary , plz help , i have dell t 140 and i change mode from ahci to raid , and i finshed all steps in lifecycle controller , but in this steps ( during installing windows server no see any hard disk - i change the 2 hard by new 2 ssd and still now see any drive- than i go to into repaer windows to open cmd and typ list disk and still now any driver ) whats can i do . and in this way from windows like your video it is the same benfets for miror , and can i do your way with AHCI MOD . thanks and plz help
When i click add mirroring I keep getting an error saying 'the disk could not be converted to dynamic because security is enabled on one or more partitions'. I can't find the solution online.
Can I mirror my original drive that has the windows OS boots from? Also can I then take the mirror drive and then transfer it over to a new PC? Will the windows OS be installed on that mirrored drive so I don't have to reinstall it on a new PC?
Hello. I have a problem. on a computer unit I have two hdd 6-terabyte . I have configured raid 1 and installed windows 10 . But I only have a 2 tera partition. On 3.5 tera can not create another partition. Help.
He should do a video on when a drive goes down on windows soft raid 1. Its not as care free as hardware raid cards. Dynamic disks can be a issue. But he left that for you guys to find out.
i just use a batch file to mirror a data drive i have on an old pc, once a day it just copies changes from one drive to another, no read or write benefits, just some redundancy if one drive fails, twice i have had raid issues on a NAS box, i refuse to use it now.
@@klatlap Let me guess you were using Raid 5 on the NAS. I only use RAID 1 or RAID 10. Have 5 NAS boxes all RAID 1 or 10 ZERO issues in 14 years with them Had to replace 2 Drives I think. no issues. Same with all my Dell Blade servers using hardware raid 10. Very easy to swap a live failed drive no shut down needed. RAID 5 I would never use unless I wanted issues. :)
@@Physics072 yes was using raid 1, the NAS box failed, i also had a NAS box in raid 1 at worked, it was hit with a virus twice through exploits in the NAS software, i know the same could happen using a pc, i just feel easier to use a pc to achieve the same result.
@@klatlap Raid is not a back up so it will not stop a virus. The virus would affect a single drive or Raid 10 does not matter. Still need backups. What brand NAS was it? or what software? I use XigmaNAS AKA nas4free. Just for file storage and Plex movies. Had them since 2012 or so. Never turn them off 24/7 lost 1 Drive no data loss.
I have two questions. First, does this work for M.2/NVMe drives as well, and second, is it possible to set up two or three RAID 1's? I have to M.2's that I want to have as a RAID 1 boot drive, two HDDs for storage but because of the size (8TB) I want to RAID 1 them, and I also have 2 SSDs (haven't decided if I want to RAID those yet or not).
This video was exactly what I was looking for. How to setup RAID 1 with an existing drive and a new drive. Thank you!
Raid 1 is so much more simple to setup than I thought. Thanks for the concise video.
Two videos from Gary, must be my lucky day
I know this is 5yrs old, but I am surprised I haven't seen your videos until now. This likely works in Windows 11 Pro as well, so this will be nice to set this up. I appreciate your videos. Very well explained.
Welcome aboard. Glad I could help!
This was INCREDIBLY helpful and simple to follow!
omg, you just made my day. thank you so much. Studying for my CompTIA and I really needed some clarification on RAID...
Very helpful. One small bonus tid-bit, you can quickly get to Disk Management by right-clicking the start button on your desktop on Server or Windows 10 :)
This guy made it so easy. Why can't other people explain as he can?
Thank you for the compliment, much appreciated.
Thanks for this Gary, but there's an important factor that I would like to add. Sorry if it's been added already..
The partition 'Style' on both drives must be the same - either MBR (Master Boot Record) or GPT (globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). Doesn't matter which, as long as they are the same.
Great video! As a followup, what happens when one of your disks crash? Is it a matter of pulling it out and letting the good one run on its own or do you have to either add a new disk to replace/resync the bad one right away for your system to work properly again? Can the system just boot up and run on the one good disk without the mirrored disk, or do you have to remove the mirroring?
I believe (not an expert) that if one drive fails, you’ll just keep rolling on the working mirrored drive. You’ll still be able to access the data, boot if it’s a bootable drive, etc., just no redundancy. If you’re using an NAS, they can designate a hot spare, which sits unused (on but no access), until a drive fails, then will be used to replace the mirror (R1) or whatever drive failed in an array (R10) automatically. Note that if using R0, you’ll need to restore from backup as there is no redundancy.
If a drive fails, shut to PC down, remove the failing drive, replace with another, then go through the mirroring process again.
Not sure how you actually know if a drive is failing though.
This tutorial is fine, for a "D" drive.
But I believe is not advisable for a "C" drive.
If you create a software RAID 1 for your "C" (boot) drive, then if the original drive fails, you will not be able to boot up.
Windows knows nothing about the RAID, until Windows starts. As such, the first/original drive will need to work, and boot, until Windows gets up far enough to start the software RAID 1.
This will not be an issue, if you do your RAID via hardware, as your storage controller will be working and it is the controller that has the RAID info, and will boot from either drive.
Cheers!
@[k]night Mirroring your "C" drive, via RAID 1, for the reason you specified is a very good idea. It is the implementation of the RAID that I wrote about in my initial comment.
This video explains how to do a "software" RAID. In my opinion, that is not a good way to mirror your boot drive.
The proper way to mirror your boot drive is to use a "hardware" raid controller (not "software", via your operating system).
If you have a server, then you very, very, likely have a hardware controller that will support the common RAID modes (0, 1, 5, and 10, and maybe others).
Most motherboards come with hardware RAID built in. I have not checked lately, but even my Asus motherboard, manufactured in 2006, has it built in. So you should definitely have a hardware RAID controller on your motherboard. In the off-chance that you do not, then an add-in RAID controller card will remedy that.
And a RAID that is managed via a hardware controller will normally provide optimal performance. It will take zero resources from your CPU.
With a software RAID, your operating system handles the RAID, and that takes CPU cycles.
With a hardware RAID 1 (mirror), you still boot from only one drive. But your controller will keep both drives in sync. And if the drive that boots should fail, then your controller will let you boot from your other drive.
With a software RAID, if your boot drive fails, then Windows will not start, and your RAID never becomes active, and your mirrored drive will not boot.
Check your motherboard manual (should be available on-line) for RAID options. Also, upon booting up, you should see something like "Press F8 for RAID configuration", or whatever the special keys are for your computer.
Cheers!
@[k]night A note of caution:
Mirroring a drive is not a substitute for doing backups.
If you mistakenly delete the wrong file, then a RAID 1 will delete that file from both of your drives.
A disgruntled employee puts a virus on the server? Both drives are mirrored. You are out of luck. Unless...
Unless you do backups, and you have them available to restore your server.
@@NoEgg4u Thanks a lot for that info!!!
Why not use the recommended GPT (?) format type? I was told there were benefits.
Nice video Gary! One thing that you should add is about the difference between doing in Windows and in BIOS, mentioning the advantages and disadvantages of both.
Can you please summarize the differences a bit? I'm really interested in using raid as an ssd alternative.
Well, I don't know much, but what I know is this:
- Operating System raid is more reliable, you aren't tied to the hardware in case of a motherboard failure and it is much easier to rebuild the raid array. The downside is that it is a bit slower than hardware/BIOS raid.
- Bios/Hardware raid is faster, you can setup before installing the OS and install the OS on it. The downside is that you are tied to that specific raid controller that comes with that motherboard, it might not be compatible with others.
@@gusgyn well, I think it's important to differentiate between the BIOS RAID ("fake RAID") and true hardware RAID. I recently setup and tested the exact same three drives in RAID5 using both BIOS/fake RAID on my Z690 motherboard and the Parity method in Windows. The BIOS/fake RAID had write speeds half that of the Windows software RAID. My mind was honestly blown.
I right-clicked on my PC's main disk, but it didn't give me an option to mirror that disk.
You have to leave one disk with unalocate and then righ click and find the option active
Any advice, I am getting the following error message when trying to create a mirror of my C drive (virtual disk manager the disk could not be converted to dynamic because security is enabled on one or more partitions) both SSD's are brand new.
Hello Gary, thnx for this nice video. I have 2 questions: 1-) Can we do this RAID 1 mirroring with 2 external hard drives? 2-) How do we know if one of these mirrored drives fails (breaks down)? Thank you...
I have a computer with Windows 10 Pro installed. All of my programs and data are stored on this one 2TB hard drive. Is it possible to do Raid 2 on the entire hard drive without losing data even though the drive has the operation system on it? Thanks.
RAID 2? Are you sure?
@@GaryExplains I'm sorry.. I meant Raid 1.
I’m sorry. I meant Raid 1.
I'm sorry. I meant to say Raid1. When I attempt to follow your method to add Raid1 to a disk that is the boot disk, has the system files and my data, I get an error message saying, error message saying "the selected GPT formatted disk contains a partition which is not of type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID' and is both preceded and followed by a partition type 'PARTITION_BASIC_DATA_GUID."
Converting your disk from GPT to MBR as suggested by another you tuber did not resolve the problem. any advice?
Yeah, I deliberately showed how to do this on a data dusk rather than a boot disk as converting a boot disk to RAID isn't necessarily trivial. I am sure it is possible but I haven't done it myself. One way to play around with it is to create a Windows VM, add two disks and simulate your setup and see if it works.
Warning about Raid 1 that Gary did touch on. I was using a hardware raid controller. Mirrored don't need backup WRONG! Drive failed and scrambled data. The RAID dutifully mirrored the corruption. Lost everything.
It's good practice to have an external backup that you manually backup periodically.
How does a HDD scramble data? in a way that said scrambled data can be mirrored? Did you accidentally delete the files? Did a virus delete them? What happened?
How's about system drive /system partition RAID ?would that be possible in windows software RAID.
SUPER Great guide. Just dumped a whole bunch of Roms and saves from my consoles and would hate to do that again!
Awesome. Just what I was looking for. Thanks!
i dont know why, but i have two 500GB drives, one from seagate and one from WD, and the add mirrir option for me is grey, even tho the WD is all unallocated. can anyone help?
ı guess it have to be same company or even same model.
So the raid 1 on win 10 only for data, not OS?
For OS with raid 1 u have to build with raid controller?
Gary, I have win10 pro installed on an M.2 ssd and two internal hard drives mirrored (RAID 1). My win10 is corrupted and beyond fixing (actually nothing works to fix it), if I reinstalled a fresh copy on my m.2 boot ssd, will my RAID drives come back online .. without losing any data on them... when the new fresh copy of Windows 10 is up and running? Thanks in advance.
Dear Gary,I set up the Win 10 RAID 1 with two identical hard disks and it works ok. Then, one day, I installed a case fan into the case and unplugged both hard disks because they were in the way. Afterwards I turn on the PC and noted that disk management indicated that both hard disks were failed, i.e. without any disk allocation (it used to be D:/) . I needed to do the disk allocation to both disks which leads to both disks had to be formatted. All data in both disks lost. Luckily I had all data backed up in external hard disk.
Edward Lee did you ever figure out the issue?
I wish he had covered what you do if one of the disks dies and you need to rebuild the array. Does the system keep working normally? does it notify you? will you be able to just add another drive and tell windows to fix it or do you need something outside windows?
Those are good topics, but a bit outside of the "set up" theme for this video. It might be something I could so as a follow-up video. I will add it to my TODO list. But in short, of course Windows notifies you. It would be a bit pointless if it didn't. All you need to do is replace the broken drive and Windows will take care of the rest. It is trickier when you are talking about a RAID 1 boot drive, which is why I didn't cover that in this video.
Gary Explains Thanks for the info! I’m planning on doing a raid 1 setup as a media drive so this is more up my ally than a boot drive anyway.
Exactly what I needed, thank you Gary!!!
You're welcome! Glad it helped!
Did you do one regarding Storage Spaces? I believe that came out after this video.
Can you tell me how to UN-RAID my two hard drives. Or have another VDO on how to UNRAID HDDs. Thank you.
Hi! Thanks for the video! I am doing right now a RAID1 in my computer but I failed at 4:33 with an error message. Why did you choose MBR instead of GPT? Is it possible to do it with GPT? Thanks a lot! Anyone? :)
Thanks for your video! After watching I came up with 2 questions: 1. If one of the drive fails, how do we know? Since there is only one D: showing in This PC and I assume as long as one hard drive is working it’s accessible. 2. We don’t need to back up for disc 1 before mirroring it right? Thank you!
how would we replace a dead disk in that mirrored pool? not sure you can convert the remaining disk to basic and re-mirror?
You just take out the bad disk, put in a new some that has the same size and let the OS do the rest.
Gary Explains reason I asked this was that doesn’t seem to work, I sabotaged a disk, pulled out the data cable, the remaining disk removed mirroring, and stayed a dynamic disk.. attached the drive, nothing.. couldn’t add mirror rescanned disk etc, not good.. didn’t reboot the pc though.. give it a shot
great..man... thanks ...
youve explained in a very simple way....
Hello Sir.. I am having one question...
I have workstation having windows 10 pro.. currently not configured as RAID1.. Also I have installed my all the softwares and required files for programming.. So if I follow your process for RAID1 configuration, then will it be possible for mirroring?? And will it work successfully for my programming softwares??
how do I replace a drive if one go bad...thx
Hey Gary, my question is "can I use the second hdd in a different machine or is it a companion to the mirrored hdd?"
Short answer, no
Is Windows Storage Spaces the same thing or working better/worse?
Hi Gary, can you mirror the redundancy in Win 10 Pro at a (pre-set) scheduled time? Thank you, Eric
1st of all, thank you.
I recently got 2 3tb hitachi's after my seagate 2tb failed, and wanted to give raid1 a go because not having a back up sucks. Went into bios on my msi b350 gaming pro and enabled raid and set up the arrays. Everything looked hunky dorry but when booting into windows it would blue-screen and say that "Windows could not read from boot device" which happens to be a 500gb ssd. It seemed fine in the bios, the SSD as one array and the two 3tb's as another. But no matter what, it would bsod during some point of loading into windows.
I went online to try and figure out wtf I was doing wrong when I stumbled upon this video. I decided to attempt this method,and after a bit of frustration , I got it to work. My issue was when windows was formatting the drives, they were set to MBR which apparently has a 2tb limit. Simply switching them to GPT let me progress without issue. I would rather have them working in raid1 from bios, but this way works fine for my needs. It's mainly only used for games and videos and I doubt there would noticeable performance difference between either method for loading games. I still have no clue what I was doing wrong in bios though. But oh well.
Now if only there was a trick to retrieving data from failing drives, I've heard that sticking them in a freezer bag and freezing them overnight can work, guess we'll give that a go, but something tells me I'm not getting that 1.8gb on data back easily.
SynKron or other synchronizing software can be used to make automated backups of drives. Always keep 2 backups, ideally 1 offsite for anything important. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP
@@mrmotofy Its true its not a backup but it is more of a backup than no backup at all. Most people never keep up on automated backups and thus have to go to a 3 month old or older backup. Best is raid 1 or 10 to raid 10 backup to raid 10 offsite storage. Most people can't afford it and go to ghetto raid like unraid.
@@Physics072 That's why automated backups are important. SynKron and many others can do a scheduled backup. Syncthing is another good one I use for my phone/tablet. Get home they connect to Wi-Fi and poof backups my pics and data to my server. If I'm away from home on vacation etc, disable the Wi-Fi requirement connect to my VPN then poof it all backs up to server. So I lose devices my data is already home.
Thank you for explanation! You have answered all my qurstions! :)
You are so welcome!
wow I didn't know it was super easy on windows 10 pro. thanks a lot 😍😍
Tried this with 1Tb c:\ HDD with a 1Tb HDD as a mirror, but I get an error message "there is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation", no matter what I do. I tried a 2Tb HDD as a mirror instead, same problem. Windows 10 64bit pro. Is there another tutorial for bugfixes?
Same issue I have too - driving me mad trying to resolve
Ty gary, it help me a lot, i dont have any idea to do that.
Thank you for the great explanation. Can the HDD be running on a USB 3.0 bus?
Hi Gary, a quick one- if you already have data on your existing drive, would it wipe out the data if you install another drive and configure them both as RAID 1?
Fast forward two years later I would like to know as well
No, it doesn't wipe out the existing data.
That's exactly what he did in this video. He had about a terabyte of data on the old D: drive, and when he added the mirror it all got copied to the new drive.
Great video Gary. Will this still work if you use a USB HDD dock and after you complete the mirroring remove the HDD and use it as removable backup drive?
*GARY!!!* *Afternoon Professor!!!* A two-fer today!
MARK!!!
I set this up for my cold storage (like a nas built into my desktop) but I want to upgrade my PC and I am trying to figure out the best way to move this raid 1 array through the upgrade.. effectively a new computer and new windows installation.
Hello! Will I also be able to create two independent raid 1 of 4 hard disks, as shown in the video?
Once RAID is setup, I’m assuming it will continue to copy and mirror any future changes to the primary drive that we are mirroring?
Yes, of course.
Thanks for the video! So is this RAID0 or RAID1? and why my "Add Mirror ..." is grayed out? Thank you for advice!
Are you using Windows 10 Home or 10 Pro?
@@VPC 10 Pro. Thanks man!
Sir I have a question for instance that your drive C already have existing files and wish to add new hardrive as drive D. If you mirror drive C to D drives, does file C existing files lost? or rather automatically mirrors it as one drive.
I've got 2 x16TB pro drives coming to me tomorrow. Not sure if I should do this or the other one that combines them and improves performance slightly.
Gary, you are awesome! Doing this right now!
do you leave 127MB available on propose? why? can you mirror the whole 2TB disk?
working as a RAID/Storage QA for quite sometime, my suggestion to users is to go with same type of drive i.e rpm ,size,type :ssd,sata(however vendors can be different) this will not create bottleneck of performance during read ops.
Even if it's been a whole year later, thanks for this post. Paired with this video, I gained useful knowledge ... Kinda scary, for YT (lol), but appreciated!
1:05 describes RAID 0 Striping, not RAID 1 Mirroring. A mirrored drive writes to both drives simultaneously with the same data. That way if one drive fails you have a 100% backup copy. There's a way to mirror the boot drive so that all writes (including deletes) are done the same to both but booting and reading is done from the mirrored drive chosen (or defaulted to after a set time) at boot.
RAID 0 Striping breaks data into chunks and writes and reads in parallel to all drives in the array. A problem with this is failure of any one drive results in total data loss. Only use RAID 0 when you need speed *and* either the data can easily be replaced or re-created, or you have a backup.
RAID 4 is striped like RAID 0 but one drive in the array (a minimum of 3 drives are required) holds parity data which can be used to re-create the data from the stripe pieces on the rest of the array. If the parity drive quits the array can be set to "fall back" to RAID 0 until the parity data is rebuilt. If a data drive fails then you get to let it sit there and take the time to rebuild. Losing any two drives is almost 100% a guarantee of losing all the data. The chances of recovering anything increase with larger arrays and if the parity drive was not one that failed.
RAID 5 is striped with parity but instead of putting all the parity data onto one drive it's distributed among all the drives. Like with RAID 4 the total capacity is one drive less than the total of all the drives. The loss of any single drive has the same 'penalty' of time required to rebuild. As with RAID 4 at least three drives are required. Unlike RAID 4 the loss of two drives may not be a death sentence to all the data. The more drives there are in a RAID 5 array, the more 'spread out' the data is, increasing the likelihood that many files won't have any pieces on the failed drive, and the possibility of using the parity data to re-create pieces that were on the failed drive.
IIRC some fancy RAID controllers can re-create the lost data on the fly and allow it to be accessed while the data is being rebuilt onto a replacement drive.
There are various modifications to the "standard" RAID types. For the highest cost + fastest speed + best security a mirrored RAID 5 is what to use. It has less than 50% of the total capacity available yet can recover from a simultaneous failure of one drive on both sides of the mirror, or anything up to a total loss of everything on one side of the mirror *plus* one drive on the other side. Recovery from that would entail replacing the single failed drive on one side, letting it rebuild, then replacing all the failed drives (or all of them just to be sure) then re-mirroring all of it.
If a mirrored RAID 5 controller can make each drive on both sides 100% identically written to its companion on the other side, then it might be possible to swap drives from one side to the other in the event of multiple failures on each side that are not both in the same position. For example there's 6 drives on each side and 0, 3, and 5 fail on one side while 1, 2, and 4 fail on the other. A controller that can automatically fall that back to run as a regular RAID 5 would be very nice, especially if 6 new drives can be hot swapped in and it'll silently rebuild and switch back to mirrored mode when done.
LOL, no, for RAID 1 mirroring there is an increase in read speed as I describe, but not for write speed.
@@GaryExplains there's no change in speed at all for a mirrored pair of drives. The same data is being written to two drives at the same time, for the sole purpose of not losing it if one drive fails. Every file is 100% present on both drives.
RAID 0, 4, 5 and other methods that use striping (which RAID 1 does not!) get a speed boost for both writing and reading due to better use of the available bandwidth by splitting writes to two or more drives. If each drive individually can write large files at 100 megabytes per second, a 4 drive RAID 0 can (given a sufficiently fast connection) write that same file at nearly 400 megabytes per second - at the cost of losing the data if a drive fails.
I've been in the business of computers since 1983. I know what's mirroring and RAID, and what you start describing at 1:05 *is not mirroring*.
LOL, you do understand that read and write are different operations and that different RAID levels offer different read and write characteristics. It is simply false to say that there is no read speed improvement with mirroring. I suggest you go back and understand these things. You seem to like to write verbatim comments as if somehow quantity makes up for lack of understanding.
Let me help you a little. So there are two disks, one a mirror of the other. When writing the data needs to be written to both disks. Great. But you are saying that during read operations only one disk will be used and the other ignored, even though the second disk has the same data on it, you assert that the disk will remain unused even when using it would increase the read performance. 🤔
@@GaryExplains reading exactly the same data from two drives cannot make it read faster. Striping makes reads faster because the data being read from each drive is different. It's interleaved like dual channel RAM. In a two drive array with 4k stripes 8k of data can be read in the same time as 4k from a single drive or a mirrored pair.
The operating system (for software raid) or raid controller reads the different stripes from every drive containing part of the file and assembles them in the correct order.
A mirror pair reads the requested data from point a to b. One piece at a time.
Great video I have to say. Short and strait to topic.
HI, just tried to do this but the mirror option is greyed out on the options... any thoughts please?
Once I did a RAID this way, and it was resyncing very often and also crashing to the extent that the second drive went out of the array. After a second such crash in 2 weeks, I gave up and switched to BIOS-RAID, and never had any problems since then.
Thanks for the video Gary. I followed your steps, however when I selected my new drive i got this error message: "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid."
The two drives are identical and both listed as 465.76 GB NTFS file system. How do I manage this?
Delete the partitions on both and then set the array. You have both drives "formated" to the different sector size 512, 4096, or whatever.
very helpful, thank you. I want redundnacy for some video and photos, and would hate to lose them. Good tip on different drives from different batches/companies. I wouldn't have thought of that.
Then use an external backup and perform your backups offline...
I Gary great video, thanks a lot.
I have W10 Pro installed in 1 NVME drive (C:) and a RAID 1 (2 x 4Tb HDD = 2Gb) as a backup (D:), all is up and running fine.
If I need to reinstall Windows 10 Pro I still get access to the RAID 1 array and the files on it??!
Dude that was easy, awesome and very useful! Thanks a ton!!
Thank you. Just the video I was looking for.
How come i have am having issue mirrorrowing raid 1. Running two 8tb and keep having error message The operation is not supported by the object.
This worked for a couple HDD's in my system. When trying to mirror the operating system drive to another drive, it's saying "failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date". I tried sfc /scannow, uninstalling drive and rebooting, shrinking volume of disk to be mirrored, and assigning drive letter via CMD (couldn't do this because no volume's found on disk to be mirrored to).
I've had this message on a very early HP (7-8 years old). But on a later model, (4-5 years old) it worked fine.
I think it was the primitive HP BIOS that was to blame.
How do you know if/when one of the drives fails?
Sorry, it’s done with 100% healthy mirroring but when I disconnect one of the drive to check the status it’s shows disk 0 (foreign with the yellow symbol) and disk 1 (Failed Redundancy). Both 2 Tb hdd took 5 hours for Raid 1 to complete but after that the same problem at the time of experiment to see how we will find the data in absence of one of the disk failed. Help to know how to do it. Thanks
My C drive shows two other partitions one is the recovery partition and the other is a called EFI system partition,can those be mirrored as well?
Very good. Will the Windows OS be copied to the new drive also? Thank you.
Little late and I hope you got the answer by now but yes it will. It is an exact copy of the original bit for bit.
i have quesitons
i have 2tb HDD , now it health show as caution so it mean i should buy new HDD okay?
1. i am planning buy new 4tb HDD and do raid mirror. can it do? 2tb raid to 4tb?
2. after raid my two HDDs. if unexpected way my 2tb HDD gone somehow. what happened to my 4tb HDD raid ? is it nothing happened?
or i think do this way
install 4tb HDD and create many partitions. and copy past previous HDD data? what do you think?
Will this impact performance on an nvme, If I mirror it onto another nvme ?
can i do that , to have miror for for C Drive operating system, and will work or not ?
Hi Gary, If one drive fails will windows indicate it?
Yes and No. I believe all motherboards have a SMART notification or SMART Alert of a feature. That way you have two redundant notifications. One from Windows (which will notify you if a drive is about to fail) and one from the BIOS during startup. You could set up a task scheduler once a month to open CMD. Type "wmic" and hit Enter. Then type "diskdrive get status" and hit Enter. This will show you the drive health status.
Any particular reason you used the old* method instead of using Windows 10's Storage Space tool?
Storage Space is more flexible. If you want to look like a geek, do it in disk admin.
Hello Gary,
After watching the video one question emerges. Let’s say You have a hdd A. You install Win10Pro onto A. Then You insert hdd B. Is it possible to use B as a full backup of A. E.i.: is it possible to create RAID1 out of a system disk which is currently in use?
Thank You.
You can use HDD A to mirror onto drive HDD B. I tried it. Works like a charm! I suggest getting a NAS with 4 drive bays and use RAID5 for mirror your files. Or that, get a server with RAID controller and get 4 or more drives and use RAID 5 or RAID 10
sir why do we get very long resynching , any solutions ?
what cause resynching
I have actually never tried to use RAID1 on a primary drive. Let's say I have a 1TB drive as my primary HDD. Can I put in another 1TB as a secondary drive to mirror my primary HDD? I also currently have a Dell Poweredge T30 with 2 HDD's but has no built in hardware RAID controller. But only used as a file server. I will be putting in a NAS as well with 4 drive bays and I may use RAID5 on that.
how to recover hdd after using storage pool on windows . i reinstall windows and the new windows can not see my old setup storage pool. i use easeus recovery program (and on preview i ca see and play any video but after i save data way less data is available) what to do ??? any idea
hi there, How do i mirror Disk 0??
Hi, great video, thank you very much! A few questions::
-i think my motherboard (Intel DP35DP) supports RAID, is hardware or software RAID preferred?
-what happens to this mirror in the event the OS gets a virus and/or needs to be re-installed? Does the mirror break? Does it need to be re-enabled or will it maintain?
-can Windows 10 handle more than one RAID 1(mirror)? Say if I install 4 hdds?
THANKS A TON!!!
- Motherboard RAID has the disadvantage that if you need to move the drives to a different machine (say because of hardware failure) then you need to find another motherboard which supports the same RAID setup.
-The RAID can be added again to a fresh install of Windows. There maybe some re-sync/repair stuff that happens.
- Yes.
Gary Explains Thank you so much for your prompt response!
it is not showing that i can add a mirror...please help. the options is greyed out
Can I use disk which pluged into USB as mirroring disk?
Can we do this on msi h310 pro vdh plus with i5 9600k? Becuz there's no raid option in bios for sata operation
many thank eng fary , plz help , i have dell t 140 and i change mode from ahci to raid , and i finshed all steps in lifecycle controller , but in this steps ( during installing windows server no see any hard disk - i change the 2 hard by new 2 ssd and still now see any drive- than i go to into repaer windows to open cmd and typ list disk and still now any driver ) whats can i do . and in this way from windows like your video it is the same benfets for miror , and can i do your way with AHCI MOD . thanks and plz help
When i click add mirroring I keep getting an error saying 'the disk could not be converted to dynamic because security is enabled on one or more partitions'. I can't find the solution online.
I have win 10 pro . right click on the drive shows add mirror as inactive what could be the reason??
i follow the steps but i get an error that says i have to refresh the console or restart the pc and try again. ???? any help ?
Ok so it's done on en extra disk! But! If you want to mirror or raid 1 on the booting disk ? Is it so simple ?
Just the same. I think mirroring a booting disk is the most wothwhile.
Can I mirror my original drive that has the windows OS boots from? Also can I then take the mirror drive and then transfer it over to a new PC? Will the windows OS be installed on that mirrored drive so I don't have to reinstall it on a new PC?
Can I do this with a boot drive!?
What HDD do you use for the mirroring, normal desktop HDD or NAS HDD?
NAS drive shouldn't be necessary since you will only be using the mirrored drive as much as the original.
@@yoddy0 thanks for the reply...
Thanx! I got good advice!)
How to you install Windows 10 in a RAID configuration rather than configuring disk mirroring once Windows is installed?
Hello. I have a problem. on a computer unit I have two hdd 6-terabyte . I have configured raid 1 and installed windows 10 . But I only have a 2 tera partition. On 3.5 tera can not create another partition. Help.
can you Raid 1 the OS drive while it's running?
He should do a video on when a drive goes down on windows soft raid 1. Its not as care free as hardware raid cards. Dynamic disks can be a issue. But he left that for you guys to find out.
i just use a batch file to mirror a data drive i have on an old pc, once a day it just copies changes from one drive to another, no read or write benefits, just some redundancy if one drive fails, twice i have had raid issues on a NAS box, i refuse to use it now.
@@klatlap That works too, more than one way to skin a cat :)
@@klatlap Let me guess you were using Raid 5 on the NAS. I only use RAID 1 or RAID 10. Have 5 NAS boxes all RAID 1 or 10 ZERO issues in 14 years with them Had to replace 2 Drives I think. no issues. Same with all my Dell Blade servers using hardware raid 10. Very easy to swap a live failed drive no shut down needed.
RAID 5 I would never use unless I wanted issues. :)
@@Physics072 yes was using raid 1, the NAS box failed, i also had a NAS box in raid 1 at worked, it was hit with a virus twice through exploits in the NAS software, i know the same could happen using a pc, i just feel easier to use a pc to achieve the same result.
@@klatlap Raid is not a back up so it will not stop a virus. The virus would affect a single drive or Raid 10 does not matter. Still need backups. What brand NAS was it? or what software? I use XigmaNAS AKA nas4free. Just for file storage and Plex movies. Had them since 2012 or so. Never turn them off 24/7 lost 1 Drive no data loss.
what if drive letters are changed anyhow in future? or is it work with external drives as well?
What if you put two cans of RAID ? would that work ?
I have two questions. First, does this work for M.2/NVMe drives as well, and second, is it possible to set up two or three RAID 1's? I have to M.2's that I want to have as a RAID 1 boot drive, two HDDs for storage but because of the size (8TB) I want to RAID 1 them, and I also have 2 SSDs (haven't decided if I want to RAID those yet or not).