Raid 1 question with Abit AV8 board

[lynx6200]

My board supports raid, and recently I setup two sata hard drives, and used the raid software that came with the board to setup raid 1. After the setup, my second disk, the mirroring disk, no longer shows up in my computer or as a drive in "disk management", but stills shows as working in the raid software.

I suppose, in Raid 1, all the data should be consistent on the two drives, like when a change is made to drive 1, its copied on drive 2. Is there a way I can verify the data is constant, and the mirrored drive is doing what it should? (without booting it as primary)

Note, in the raid software, theres and option to synchronize the two drives, but I don't see why this would be necessary if raid is working correctly. Also, if drive 1 did in fact fail, and drive 2 kicked in, it should still load with windows right, but would it need to be activated again?

Thanks.

[johnb35]

If you truly set up raid 1, which you would have to install the raid drivers at the F6 prompt at the beginning of windows install, then you will only see 1 physical drive in "my computer". When you are running intel raid and have intel matrix storage manager running on bootup, it will tell you when a hard drive has failed and needs to be replaced or repaired. When a drive fails and you need to replace it with a new one, all you do is connect the new drive boot into windows and it should start rebuilding the raid. No reactivation required. I run raid 1 since I don't have very good luck with hard drives. Having problems with Maxtor and Western Digital right now. Also have a samsung drive in my system to try them out. The Maxtor's are pretty noisey, the Western Digital and Samsung are quiet.

Are you using the board that is in your signature?

[lynx6200]

In regards to this issue, I am not using the setup in my sig., what im using is an amd 3400+ with Abit AV8 board, 2 sata drives, 1G mem., XP pro

I installed windows like you said, using f6 promt, and raid drivers. So, initialy, I could see both physical drives, now just the main one. After I enabled raid through the software (theres no option for this in bios, except boot to raid add-in card) it restarted and did a mirror copy of the drive. Now, all Im trying to figure out, is if the it constantly backing up my primary drive, like whenever I save a document, install software, etc. Its not something I need to do manually? even though theres an option to synchronize the disk through the raid software....

[johnb35]

Whatever data you save, gets saved to both drives, not just one. Thats the whole idea for Raid 1 setup. Raid 1 is mirroring, whatever is on drive 1 will be on drive 2 in case something happens to either drive you still have a complete working drive with all data intact.

[oscaryu1]

johns right, or else i would have found the same file on both of my raid hdds... thought it was plain weird till i read some posts

[lynx6200]

I understand that, what Id like to know, is how I can verify its working properly. Would I need to hook up the mirror drive as primary to verify that its doing what it should, or is there another way I can verify this?

[johnb35]

If its in RAID, then its doing what it should be doing. If you want, you can put it in another machine and verify. But I think you are worrying too much