![]() Two or more hard drives: If you decide on Windows software RAID, you may use any drives you choose. If possible, buy a card that supports greater-than-2.2TB disks and 6Gbps SATA III. Adaptec, Promise and other vendors offer a wide selection of pricier, but more capable RAID adapters with onboard cache and advanced features. Basic PCI and PCIe adapters supporting RAID levels 0, 1, 10, and sometimes 5 can be found online for $100 or less. If your PC doesn’t have integrated RAID, you may use an adapter card. Check your PC or motherboard documentation to find out if your motherboard supports RAID (and if so, which levels), and for specific installation instructions. You probably already have a RAID controller in your PC many older midrange and high-end motherboards come with secondary RAID controller, and newer motherboard chipsets offer integrated RAID obviating the need for an additional controller. RAID controller: If you don’t use software RAID, there’s hardware. Though you’ll see a lot of talk about hardware RAID being faster, this discussion predates modern CPUs which can easily handle the overhead. Restoring mirrors isn’t as dead simple as it is with a hardware solution either. Also, maintenance performed by Windows when it feels it’s needed, which can occur any time there’s a configuration change, hurts performance while in progress. The disadvantages are that other operating systems, such as the Linux used on repair discs, can’t see Windows software RAID partitions which use Microsoft’s dynamic disk technology. ![]() You can mirror individual partitions, including partitions from different drives onto a single drive. It’s also more flexible with mirrors, allowing you to create them from existing volumes containing data, as well as delete either half of a mirror with the other remaining intact. You can create arrays from within Window Drive manager so there’s no BIOS to configure. Windows Server operating systems from 2000 on have JBOD, 0, 1, plus support for RAID 5 distributed parity.Windows 2000 Professional also has JBOD, 0, and 1. Windows 7 Home allows JBOD and RAID 1 while Professional and Ultimate add RAID 0 mirroring.Windows Vista Ultimate allows JBOD and RAID 1 striping.Windows XP allows spanned volumes (one volume over two or more disks), aka JBOD. ![]() What type depends on the flavor of Windows: Windows Software RAID: Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft integrated RAID functionality into its operating systems. The array is still usable in the meantime. When one of the drives in a RAID 5 array fails, the data content of that failed drive is reconstructed using the parity bits on the surviving drives and written to a new, replacement drive. Where RAID 1 requires 50% of available storage for redundancy, RAID 5 requires only 33%. Instead of using an entire hard drive as a backup, RAID 5 spreads redundancy information-called parity bits-across all of the array’s drives. RAID 5 (Distributed Parity): Though you get both faster disk performance and data protection from this setup, it requires a minimum of three hard drives. RAID 1 offers no gain in performance and effectively reduces available capacity by half-two 2TB drives provide only 2TB of storage. ![]() Since each drive is an exact duplicate of the other, you can continue working if one fails. RAID 1 (Mirroring): A RAID 1 setup protects data from drive failure by simultaneously writing the same data to two hard drives. RAID 0 setups are standard on high-end gaming PCs and graphic design workstations, and provide a measurable, albeit modest performance boost for hard-disk-intensive programs. ![]() Unfortunately, RAID 0 provides no data protection-in fact, it actually increases the chances of data loss since the failure of either drive in the array results in the loss of the data stored on both drives. By leveraging two data busses, data can be read and written more quickly. RAID 0 (Striping): This setup increases hard-drive performance by splitting, or striping, data across two drives. ![]()
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