Software RAID how to anyone?

[Reverend Maynard]

Howdy all. I was looking to setup a raid array on my win2k advanced server box. It's a cheap old box that mainly just gets used for games when I have people over, so I don't want to get a controller for it. The problem is, I can't figure out how to make win2k do raid in software. Anyone have a lonk to a good how-to?

[FrankDC]

It's simple, go into Disk Management and click once on each drive, then right-click and choose 'Upgrade to Dynamic Disk'. Then you can create your array.

[Sasq]

word of warning though, its a dualboot to win ME or win 98 etc you will loose the ability to boot to them.

Danny

[Reverend Maynard]

From what I can see, you can only make an array out of unused space on the HDD's in the system. I was hoping to array the bootable drive (c) with my secondary drive.

[FrankDC]

You would need a hardware RAID controller to do that.

[EdSki]

Should be as simple as right clicking the simple volume to be mirrored--> add mirror. Naturaly you need enough unallocated space on the other (dynamic!) disk or the add mirror option won't be available.

Grtz,
Ed

[Chucky Cheese]

what about the "substitute" command in a batch file on startup? ...poor mans raid system ?

one of the systems that i work on at work is using winnt 4.0 sp5 on an alpha for machine control and performance measuring. when it comes up i see it substituting all available network drive letters to it's(..local d drive)...when the machine is off line i have browsed the file system, the machine looks as though it has an enormous D drive...which i know it doesn't

cc

[Reverend Maynard]

I can see how the substitude command could do something like the whole "just a bunch of disks" idea. I was just looking to do this to suck a little extra performance out of my old system. It seems, however, that with software you can't include your bootable drive.

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Reverend Maynard:
It seems, however, that with software you can't include your bootable drive.</font>

Its like a chicken and egg thing. SW RAID relies on the OS so you have to have the OS up and running first. Also, SW RAID doesn't allow you to share the array with other OSes.

[EdSki]

Xortam,

You -can- boot from a software mirror in win2k (you could also do this in nt4). However if the first one fails you probably get an error booting and you would have to make the other one master if it's ide. (never tried it)

In fact someone once posted here who did exactly this (don't remember who)

grtz,
Ed

[xortam]

EdSki, I was referring to a striped array versus mirroring. I agree ... I don't see why you'd have any problem booting off a mirrored volume. I've used a few machines set up with HW RAID but I've never used SW RAID so I'm just going on intuition here.

[EdSki]

Ah I thought you were talking about software raid in general..I was to lazy to read the entire thread again..sorry


Grtz,
Ed

[xortam]

Well it was never specifically spelled out what RAID level was being talked about but the stated goal was increased performance and most of us run RAID 0 for just that reason. Personally, I have no burning need for redundancy so simply striping the drives gives me the best in throughput and capacity.