You can definitely move the disks around in a Windows software mirror. I Had to do it the other day after a disk failed. I have never had disk signature issues like you describe except on clusters (and those are not really a big problem on 32 bit Windows b/c of dumpcfg). Easily fixable arc path problems, yes.
All that said, I never do anything like this without a verified disk image taken of the good disk when the OS is not running. (Using a bootable image making CD, for example, or even pulling the disk and putting it in a different machine.) From: Bill Songstad [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 12:01 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Once more - software RAID A software mirror creates a mirror and that will protect you from a single disk failure. That is a certainly better than nothing at all if redundancy is your goal. A couple of things to keep in mind though, a windows software mirror will have a read/wite performance cost that you might notice if you are doing huge file copies or disk to disk backups to that drive. Too much activity, and the write operations could trip. That can cause a system crash or file corruption which is worse than nothing at all. You really should evaluate your server disk load before deciding on a software raid. The worst thing though, in my opinion is the way windows handles disk signatures in this case. It is imparative that you never change disk order in the event of a failed mirror. If your primary goes down, you must rebuild the new disk as the primary. You cannot simply move the secondary to the primary slot and boot. Also you cannot take the secondary out and drop it in identicle hardware and have it boot as a test machine. The mirror has to exist, even if broken, in the right order. All that said, I have one server running software raid, and I want to change it to hardware raid because it does disk to disk backups and sometimes they fail on me. So although I think it is better than nothing, I still hate it. Bill On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 8:37 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: Greetings! I pulled a PE-850 out of storage to re-build. It will be running Windows 2003 SP2. Its sticker said two SATA drives... It turns out it lacks a PERC (Dell RAID controller). Given that each disk has more than adequate space for both a system partition and the data partition (for its intended use), what is the consensus... Is the Microsoft "software RAID", to mirror the disks in a quasi RAID1, better than nothing, the equivalent of nothing, or worse than nothing? Thanks! -- Richard D. McClary Systems Administrator, Information Technology Group ASPCA(r) 1717 S. Philo Rd, Ste 36 Urbana, IL 61802 [email protected] P: 217-337-9761 C: 217-417-1182 F: 217-337-9761 www.aspca.org <http://www.aspca.org/> The information contained in this e-mail, and any attachments hereto, is from The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals(r) (ASPCA(r)) and is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying or use of the contents of this e-mail, and any attachments hereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify me by reply email and permanently delete the original and any copy of this e-mail and any printout thereof. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
