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Whats the best way to convert this server to using raid?

Ive got a small business that has one 500 gig main drive but its been in service for YEARS. And of course they have no backups.

Whats the best way and cheapest way to put in an external small raid array. Maybe 2 or 4 DRIVES and be able to boot from this external array. Id also need to move the data thats on the drive to the array. And no I cant reinstall windows.

I need recommendations on software to image the existing drive and what external array to use. I thought of maybe using drobo?

Thanks

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David

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Darrell Porter

What version of Windows?

Is this a domain controller or a Small Business Server edition of Windows?

Need those questions answered before I can make further recommendations.

David

P.S. if you also need more capacity then you could buy a pair of 2 x 2TB drives, for example. Mirror the 500GB to a 2TB. Then remove the 500GB from the mirror. Then mirror the 2TB to the existing 2TB. Then expand the filesystem/partition to use the extra 1500GB.

All can be done hot without rebooting, and no need to spend thousands of dollars for a decent RAID controller and external enclosure, and software RAID1 will likely outperform the 4-disk RAID5 anyway unless you spend the big bucks for a beefy controller with lots of cache.

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rindi

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