Convert USB disk to dynamic

J

Jason

Hi there,

I am trying to convert 3 eternal USB disks to dynamic so I can RAID them. My
friend has done this on his PC by removing them from the USB enclosure and
then attaching them internally as IDE disks. He could then convert them to
dynamic, he then simply put the drives back in the USB enclosures and he has
dynamic disks. I cant do this as I have a laptop, I cant believe its
impossible but I have tried searching everywhere but cant find a solution
that work in Vista. I am running Vista Home Premium.

Does anyone have any ideas I could ty please?

Cheers

Jason
 
J

Jane C

Hello Jason,

As you are running Home Premium, it won't do you any good even trying. Home
versions of Vista do not support the use of dynamic disks.
 
J

Jason

Hi Jane,

I am currently running Home Premium but will upgrade if I can get this to
work.

Cheers

Jason
 
J

Jason

Hi Kerry,

The aim is to create one large 1.5tb disk rather than 3 x 500gb disks. If I
can get this to work ok then I will try and create a RAID5.

Cheers

Jason
 
R

R. McCarty

By using DiskMgmt.Msc you can convert any "Basic" Disk directly to
a Dynamic Volume. You Right Click the Disk "X" designation and the
context menu will have a "Convert to a Dynamic Disk" option. It is a
good idea to backup/image a volume before converting to "Dynamic"
as it's not an easy thing to Undo.

Using USB as the transfer technology you're only going to achieve a
30-Megabyte or less transfer rate. You seem to be going to a lot of
effort for a marginal result. For external use, eSATA is a much better
choice for performance.

Maybe I don't understand the intent, but having 3 USB external
drives working as a single "Dynamic" volume is almost certainly going
to saturate the Hubs/Controller they are on.
 
J

Jason

Hi,

I can not use DiskMgmt as it will not work on a USB disk. I have tried
altering the registry to try to "fool" Vista into thinking that the disks
are IDE and can succeed partially. However it keeps reverting back to USB
and it will still not let me convert. I have also tried from command prompt
with the same result.

Regards

Jason
 
K

Kerry Brown

I agree with R. McCarty. The overhead of software RAID will probably cause
problems on USB drives. Even if you get it working I think it will probably
be flaky and error prone. You can buy USB enclosures that you can install
multiple drives in. These enclosures use an embedded Linux so that you can
then setup a RAID array. This way the RAID calculations and read/writes are
all done outside of Windows. The interface can be USB, SCSI, eSATA, LAN,
whatever, it makes no difference. Software RAID is a compromise at best. I
don't believe RAID 5 is supported in Vista in any case. I would look for a
different way to achieve your goal.
 

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