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Raid 10 Bootable?

Thinking about building a Windows 2012 server with a raid 10. I want to know is, can a server boot from a raid 10 or do I have to have a separate disk or a raid 1 to boot from?

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David

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bdhssa

ASKER

It is a hardware based raid.

bdhssa

ASKER

Thank you

Lee W, MVP

Hardware controllers in most cases will do fine booting from a RAID 10. HOWEVER, BE CAREFUL - The controller and the system must support UEFI and booting off GPT drives because MBR format disks can only support booting off a 2 TB "physical" disk.

noci

With software there is a setup possible.
If you ensure the bootloader + kernel comes from a raid 1 partition on the disks...
then the remainder can be configured as a stripe set.
(This is a configuration used on many NAS systems, with say 8 disks, then there is a
part of the disk partitioned for firmware, 8 way raid 1, with 2 hot + 6 spare)
and the remainder of each disk in the wanted raid, 5,6,10..

Gerald Connolly

must support UEFI and booting off GPT drives because MBR format disks can only support booting off a 2 TB "physical" disk.

If it is hardware RAID and as long as the presented LUN is <2TB then a UEFI BIOS is not required, and Windows will boot quite happily off whatever the RAID level is.

If the LUN is >2TB then a UEFI BIOS is required.

When using hardware RAID, as far as the BIOS/OS is concerned, the presented LUNs are locally connected SCSI disks.