Adding a second HDD as RAID device - Help!

[Neil Porter]

My wife has just ordered herself a Scan 3XS "value" range PC, for delivery early next week. It will be our third Scan PC (one being an audio PC in the lounge for all my music etc, the other being my high-end gaming machine based on an overclocked i7 processor ) .

The original plan had been to get a custom built PC with two matching primary drives configured as a RAID Mirror array. But the cost saving and fast lead time of the Value systems changed her mind (time being of the essence, as her laptop is fast dying and as an accountant in practice her whole business depends on her PC).

The V20 machine is ordered, and the "man at Scan" told her it was easy to add a second drive as a RAID device, so I am going to be under pressure to get this done asap after the machine arrives. But a search of WIndows 7's help and the MS website yields nothing of help - hence this post!!

Some initial (very basic!) questions are:
- Do I need some additional software, or is it done through the BIOS or within Win7??
- How is the information then copied across from the primary drive to the newly installed device?
- I suspect the new drive will need formatting etc - and that this will need doing before setting the disk up as a RAID device

If anyone can get me started on this subject, or point me to article(s) on what to do, I would be very grateful!

Many thanks in anticipation,

Neil

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Neil Porter

If you are setting up a Raid mirror you will need to wipe both drives and set them as Raid mirror in the Raid bios, if you added another drive to the build the build team can do this for you prior to installing Windows

You can set a software raid in windows if you have 2 identical drives but as far as I am aware the OS drive cant be used for this as the 2 drives need to be unallocated,also this is not the most secure way anyway so the best solution I can suggest is to use some imaging software and save a backup image of your System Drive and System reserved partition to an external backup drive

Create a bootable recovery disk for the imaging software (we use Acronis True Image) so that you can boot off the CD and access the backup image

Shut down the system and fit the new drive
Restart and Enter the bios Raid manager and create a mirror of the 2 drives (This erases all data)

Put the bootable recovery disk in and restart and boot off the CD

Select to recover the image (include C drive and System reserved) to the Raid Mirror

If you need any further advice on this please call our support line or drop us an email at systemsupport@scan.co.uk

Regards

Ben

Once

[Neil Porter]

Ben,

Thanks for the clear advice.

In view of what is required, and the fact that RAID does nothing to protect the machine/data against virus, bad software installation and other reasons for data loss except for HDD failure, I suspect we will stick with a single primary drive, and go for a more robust back-up regime.

Having had Acronis True Image packaged on our other two Scan machines, we have bought a copy for the new machine, so setting up an efficient backup schedule should not be too onerous.

But at least I know what is needed of me should my wife change her mind in the future!

Neil.

[Ben @ Scan]

Hi Neil

Acronis is a good software package and if you set it to do incremental backups its the safest bet !

Regards

Ben