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ianto39Flag for United States of America

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Disk mirroring with Intel Matrix raid vs Windows OS level.

I'm installing W2k Server on a new machine that has Intel Matrix Raid and 2 SATA Drives. I want to use mirrored drives (RAID1) for max recoverability if a drive dies.  In the past, on machines without the Matrix RAID, I've setup the mirroring at the Windows level (ie create a partition on each drive then use Disk Management to create the mirror).  I'm assuming that the general idea is that it's better to create the mirror at the BIOS/Matrix level (faster and Windows has less to do).  Also, presumably Windows will only see 1 drive and the fact that there are really 2 physical drives that are being mirrored is handled out of sight to Windows.

So my (2-part) question is:
1. Should I install the machine using the Matrix RAID setup to handle the mirroring, or do it the old way and create the mirror in Windows?

2. In the past, when a drive died I've been able to just remove the dead one (even it wasn't the primary) and Windows booted ok, then later I could pop in a new drive, recreate the mirror and all was well.  Should recovery still work like this with the Matrix RAID setup.




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Jay_Jay70
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Hi ianto39,

hardware raid any day of the week! windows mirroring is ok but i would never take it over hardware raid

basically the same recovery concept yes, you just have to configure it in the RAID BIOS
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ASKER

Thanks Jay, so does Windows just see 1 hard drive?
Is everything necessary for Windows to boot up stored on each mirrored drive, MBR's etc, so recovery can be fast and straightforward.
-i
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Jay_Jay70
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