RAID ruminations

[djarvis1one]

Greetings to all and sundry. Haven't posted in a while but I have been lurking every chance I get. I have a question about RAID. Specifically RAID 1. I did a massive upgrade on a friends computer :
mobo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131403
CPU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225
RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145222
HDD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283
O/S Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
He had purchased a 700 watt Toughpower PSU and I think a PNY GTX 465 GPU just prior to this upgrade (he tried to put that GPU on a 6 year old ASUS P4 mobo)

Anyway, the HDD flaked or rather Win 7 flaked because he had to do a hard reset when a program hung and codlocked the system. BSOD with Disc Read Error. I tried a few things and finally did a clean install of Win 7 on another 120 GB HDD. This installation worked and we are in the process of moving as much data off the 750 GB as possible.

My question to you is this, If I set up a RAID 1 on this system with 2 750's or maybe a couple of 1 TB's can I ghost the 120GB to the RAID array or do I just need to do another clean install?
Also on a RAID 1 array, if one of the HDD's crash, how will we know? Doesn't Win 7 show both drives as 1 volume when you set it up as a hardware RAID?
I apologize for the length of this post, but any help you can offer will be appreciated!

 

[The_Other_One]

I don't see why you couldn't clone it. The only problem I foresee would be your cloneing software not recognizing the drives/array. That aside, it's still essentially a single drive to the computer.

As for if it's failing, well, a few things should work. First off, when you boot the system, I'm sure your RAID bios would warn you if there were any issues with SMART or the array was degrading. As for in Windows, I'm pretty sure the drives still show up in device manager as two drives (I think...) Progams and all see it as one drive, but it still knows there are multiple drives connected.

As for actually monitoring the drives, I don't think there's any really clear cut way of doing so. I'd just suggest using your favorite application such as PC Wizard. Keep an eye on SMART. I know some server based OS's can actually email you if there's a problem, but I doubt your average copy of 7 has such features. Plus, I assume this machine will be used frequently with a monitor?

 

[djarvis1one]

I don't see why you couldn't clone it. The only problem I foresee would be your cloneing software not recognizing the drives/array. That aside, it's still essentially a single drive to the computer.

As for if it's failing, well, a few things should work. First off, when you boot the system, I'm sure your RAID bios would warn you if there were any issues with SMART or the array was degrading. As for in Windows, I'm pretty sure the drives still show up in device manager as two drives (I think...) Progams and all see it as one drive, but it still knows there are multiple drives connected.

As for actually monitoring the drives, I don't think there's any really clear cut way of doing so. I'd just suggest using your favorite application such as PC Wizard. Keep an eye on SMART. I know some server based OS's can actually email you if there's a problem, but I doubt your average copy of 7 has such features. Plus, I assume this machine will be used frequently with a monitor?

Thanks for getting back to me about this. How would a RAID 1 array interact with a third HDD? I'm wondering about leaving the 120GB in the system for the O/S and programs and then use the RAID as storage. Will this work or do I just need to use the array for everything? We are wanting some redundancy in case one of the drives flakes again but if I could isolate the O/S from the data, that would be great.

 

[mrjack]

Thanks for getting back to me about this. How would a RAID 1 array interact with a third HDD? I'm wondering about leaving the 120GB in the system for the O/S and programs and then use the RAID as storage. Will this work or do I just need to use the array for everything? We are wanting some redundancy in case one of the drives flakes again but if I could isolate the O/S from the data, that would be great.

I've had two 1TB hard drives in RAID1 alongside 4 other drives that were not in any kind of RAID array and it worked just fine. There should be no issues mixing a RAID array and non-RAID hard drives.

But remember: RAID is not a backup. Make multiple copies of the data you don't want to lose, even if you have a RAID configuration that offers redundancy.