Software RAID question

[CAFxX]

Hi everybody,
It's my intention to create a soft RAID on XPSP2. What I'd like to know
is: if I create a RAID 5 on two disks (I know this would degenerate in
some kind of RAID 1... actually I don't even know if XP allows this),
will windows allow me to add further disks to the RAID afterwards
(without reformatting the RAID)?
Thank you in advance,
Carlo Alberto Ferraris

 

[Jay]

Hi everybody,
It's my intention to create a soft RAID on XPSP2. What I'd like to know
is: if I create a RAID 5 on two disks (I know this would degenerate in
some kind of RAID 1... actually I don't even know if XP allows this),
will windows allow me to add further disks to the RAID afterwards
(without reformatting the RAID)?
Thank you in advance,
Carlo Alberto Ferraris

Hi ... Raid 5 requires at least three drives ... if only two drives
then mirror if you want redundancy ... if you are looking for
expanding drive space then stripe the two drives. Below is an capture
from this MS KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417/en-us



Later,
Jay

RAID-5 volume A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume with data and
parity striped intermittently across three or more physical disks.
Parity is a calculated value that is used to reconstruct data after a
failure. If a part of a physical disk fails, Windows recreates the
data that was on the failed part from the remaining data and parity.
You can create RAID-5 volumes only on dynamic disks, and you cannot
mirror or extend RAID-5 volumes.

 

[chusome]

FYI

Software based RAID is generally not a good idea. Hardware raid
controllers are very cheap these days and its well worth it to spend a
few bucks.
Also you cannot do software RAID-5 or RAID-1 with XP natively (can
only be done with windows server).

Check out:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343

 

[Augustus]

Hi everybody,
It's my intention to create a soft RAID on XPSP2. What I'd like to know
is: if I create a RAID 5 on two disks (I know this would degenerate in
some kind of RAID 1... actually I don't even know if XP allows this), will
windows allow me to add further disks to the RAID afterwards (without
reformatting the RAID)?

You really Windows Server 2003 for native software RAID5. XP Pro can be
hacked to do it, but I've heard of lots of failures when trying.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windowsxp_to_make_raid_5_happen/page2.html