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KTBerwickFlag for Afghanistan

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Basic, Dynamic & Striped - Server 2008 R2

Hi.

We have a running installation of server 2008 R2 which has been up for several months now. There is a single 1TB hard drive in use.

This drive is currently a basic disk and has 2 partitions -
#1 - System Reserved
#2 - The main C: drive

We have a second identical 1TB drive which is not in use (yet).

Would it be possible to convert the first disk to Dynamic then pair it with the second disk as a striped volume? All without data loss or any risk to the system?
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David
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Do yourself a favor and migrate to a hardware RAID controller if possible for a server.

Please note that MSFT does not recommend using dynamic disks as mirror for data protection on boot volumes. Use a RAID controller for that. If the 'primary' disk fails, your server will not able to boot again without manual interference. And, dynamic disks make data recovery harder in case of a drive failure.

More here on EE, a recent post concerning the matter:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28221011/Mirroring-data-in-Windows-Server-2008-R2.html
Totally agree with dlethe, striping a server is like playing russion roulette.
If you want the performance increase look into raid 10 and buy some more disks.
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ASKER

Thanks for the replies.

I only ask because we had a spare disk and I thought why not make use of it. We don't have any performance issues at the moment so I can't justify moving everything to a H/W RAID Controller.

Will probably use it as a mirror instead. Can never have too many backups.
good decision!
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Member_2_231077

You can't stripe the boot volume anyway since Windows needs software drivers loaded before it understands what striping means, it's a catch-22 situation. It would read the first stripe element from disk 1 and not understand to go to disk 2 for the second stripe element.