Don't even know if "Raid Arrays" is the right term. Please forgive me but I am a total ignoramous when it comes to this.

After my Seagate firmware debacle I now have 3 x 1 TB drives - two of which I have put in my Desktop as a Raid Array ??? setup on a two channel ST Lab SATA II 300 PCIe card. I then set up the Raid Bios as a Raid 1 (Mirror) for existing hard drives with data and this is where my questions arise.

1 - When I open Windows explorer I don't see the second drive - is this normal and if so how do I know if it's updating when I change files on the first drive.

2 - What happens if one of the drives fails - will I get a warning and can I then boot directly from the second drive - if not how do I find out that there is a problem?

3 - I will be running the third drive in an external USB casing and backup the first drive to it every night - will this work ok. What type of backup deletes old files and replaces them with the changed ones, but doesn't delete files that I have deleted from the primary drive?

Hope some of you can help a complete numpty out on this.

When you have a mirror setup, it only appears as 1 drive in explorer.

Normally you get some software from the raid card vendor that you can install. it shows you the status of the mirror, and if everything is working or not

If 1 drive fails you should be able to boot off the 1 good drive. all you need to do to is install a new replacement drive, and then rebuilt the array. you can normally do this in the raid bios, or in the installed software.

As for the backup up of files, id recommend something like Robocopy. there ara loads of options available, like only copying new / updated files to the backup location, and deleting the backup copy if you dont want the original either etc

1 - Your not really seeing 1 of the disks, your seeing the single "disk" or volume the RAID controller presents to the PC, the RAID controller will then ensure that data is mirrord accross both disks
As for updating, you will just have to trust it

2 - Best thing todo is while you have only just setup the system is to take one of the drives out and try just booting from that, i suspect it wont work.
However IIRC what happens is, is that if one of the dirves should fail, the RAID array will continue to work bu you will need to replace the disk and the controller should copy the data back across both disks.
The controller manual should tell you what warnings you will get should a drive fail.


3 - NT backup is part of windows and should do what you need. but something as simple as a scheduled commmand line batch file using xcopy would do the trick ie
xcopy C:FolderIWantBackedUp* X:MyDestination /D/I/S/Y/K/R

The /D/I/S/Y/K/R means that it will only copy newer files so it wont waste time trying to copy unmoddified files.

[Edited on 9/10/09 by Gav]

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Originally posted by Davey D

Normally you get some software from the raid card vendor that you can install. it shows you the status of the mirror, and if everything is working or not

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The software will be specific to the particular RAID controller you've installed in your PC, rather than any RAID software

quote:

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Originally posted by Ivan

Thanks Gav & Daveyd which has enlightened me to some extent. After your advice I found the management software (SATARaid5Manager) and installed it in accordance with the manual - but it wont start - double click on icon but nothing at all happens - will have to search for help on that one on Google. Tried switching off my firewall (Mcafee) but that made no difference.

Maybe search for some other Raid management software.

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