RAID1 Question

[heffay111]

I feel way more ignorant that I like to, but there's nothing I can do.

I have a self-built PC (running XP Pro SP3) to which I just added two 1TB SATA hdd's. I formatted each with one primary partition, both appeared in XP just fine. Then I used my mb's VIA RAID Controller to set up an array using RAID1, as I simply want redundancy.

My ignorant question is this: after setting up the RAID array and installing the drivers for the RAID Controller, the mirror hard drive no longer appears in XP, only the source. Is that correct? I'm thinking it is, but before I start writing to the source hd I thought I would make sure. In the XP Device Manager, the 1TB drive appears as, "VIA SATA RAID 1 SCSI Disk Device."

Am I all good? And if so, how do I know that the controller is working and that second 1TB drive is truly mirroring the first?

[arthurleung]

Yes you will only see one drive. The VIA RAID controller is handling the RAID1 in background and Windows does not need to know about it.

There should be a VIA RAID tool that you can use to monitor the status. Otherwise whenever you boot your computer it should tell you if the array is healthy or not.

[peterb]

Arthurleung is correct - you now only have one logical drive of 1Tb - but that logical drive just happens to be made up of a subsystem of two physical drives which are mirrors of each other.

[heffay111]

Thanks to you both. I had a feeling that was the case. My mb cg allegedly should have installed the VIA Utility you refer to, but multiple tries and it has not. I'll have to hunt it down and download it.

Thanks again!

[peterb]

You're welcome! And Welcome to Hexus BTW!