Kenneth Burgener wrote:
I believe RAID 1 is mirroring, and RAID 0 is striping. [1]
If you are using RAID 1, mirroring the two drives, the the maximum disk
capacity would be the capacity of one of the drives. So if you had 332
GB available then you probably were using RAID 0 striping, which is a
misnomer as there is no "redundancy" with RAID 0.
Furthermore you are using the cheap SATA BIOS RAID which, in my opinion,
is worse then standard "software" RAID as you are relying on a RAID
setup that is only standard to your motherboard. At least with an OS
fronting the "software" RAID you can generally get away with moving it
to another like machine running the same OS, or at least restoring it
from another like machine.
I agree, I only used it to begin with because I thought it was hardware
RAID. I assumed it was hardware RAID because it had a BIOS to set it up
in. I found out otherwise when I tried to install a Linux distro and it
said I had a software RAID with proprietary Windows drivers.
As far as restoring, yes you probably can restore your partitions, but
probably not without the help of a data recovery service, or some
forensic tools.
I'm interested if anyone has suggestions for such tools that might be
able to restore this fake hardware RAID partition.
Now as a suggestions, you may want to look at doing RAID 1 mirroring for
your OS partition, maybe a RAID 1 mirror for a data partition, and a
RAID 0 striping partition as a temporary space partition if you feel the
performance gain is worth the risk. Most people get a 3rd disk and use
RAID 5 as you get good disk capacity, and decent performance. Its all
about compromise.
I'm now backing up to a newly purchased 320 gig USB drive I got for only
$120. I don't need to mirror everything, so I'll use rsync from my 64
bit Linux machine to automatically back up critical stuff.
Oh and switch to Linux :-)
Done, for all my other machines. This is my old one, and it has retail
games on it I've yet to get working in Linux. I'm not waisting my 64
bit hardware on any version of Windows :).
Brandon Stout
http://mscis.org
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