Setting up RAID in Win7

[Randhart]

Hi there

I have two identical new Seagate 2TB drives and want to set-up a raid configuration. I want to have some redundancy as it will be my HTPC which will be using the setup and I want to ensure my downloaded music and video's don't die.

I have gone into Cumputer manager and tried to set-up the Array on the two disks... however when I rightclick the drives and want to create the Array all the options are greyed out. I thought it may be because the disks aren't dynamic so I cnanged both disks to dynamic but still the option to create the arrays are greyed out... This is my first attempt at creating a software raid array so do not really have a clue of what I am doing so all help will be appreciated.

btw I was using a online guide on the overclockers.com how-to guides section to set it up

Also what is the best raid configuration to use?

Thanks for you help.
Jakes

[jim]

Do you need software RAID? Your motherboard might be capable of hardware RAID, which would be a better option in all likelihood.

It's worth mentioning at this point that RAID doesn't really protect you from your downloaded media "dying". Sure, it'll protect against disk failure. Well, one disk failure. It won't protect against user error, viruses, RAID software/hardware failure, PSU failure, etc.

RAID is really for redundancy - i.e. if one drive fails, the computer will carry on working as if nothing happened. It's not to protect your data. If that's what you're after (and it sounds like you are), you'd be much better off using the drive externally, connecting it when you need to, copying all of the files over, and then storing it safely on a shelf in case the first disk has issues.

[phil4]

As has just been said RAID has only three benefits.... Redundancy as mentioned above, carrying on and recovering from a failure while staying running.

The other is potential performance gains, RAID 0 being the non-redundant common performance example, though other RAID levels (eg. 1,5,10 etc) offer both (though sometimes read is improved and write is slower or vice versa).

Spanning drives is the final, fringe benefit.

Backup is what you really want, and indeed you may want to look into at least one that is "disconnected" so an infected PC or mistake doesn't lose you files.

Sync back is a great bit of software for helping with backups and you may wan to consider some cloud backup like Wuala or Symform (two I've expience of, but not exhaustive list).

Finally NAS devices and specifically Drobos give you somewhere to backup to (perhaps using sync back), but also using RAID to protect against drive failure in the device.

Personally I won't consider something "backed up" unless I have 3 copies, one of which is offsite. At present I have a) live, b) symform to cloud and c) Syncback to a drobo.

[Randhart]

Thanks for the repsonces guys.

Well I was actually doing this mostly as a exercise in creatign RAID and wanted to see how it was done and the back-up of information was a added bonus. I have since been to play with hardware RAID and resulted in messing it all up... I did do it without a manual first time like a real man, but ended up reaching for the MB manual in the end.

Regards