Questing about disk mirroring....

[techbeck]

Ok, I have 2 identical drives with identical data. Nothing is different with the 2 drives.

If I enable disk mirroring in Windows 2003, will it wipe all info on each drive while it creates the mirror? I and just curious since I need to copy off my data if it does.

thanks

[Krispy Kritter]

Unless I'm mistaken, this is simply software RAID. And I believe you will need to format the new "drive" before use, so yes, you will lose the data. Even if it isn't supposed to delete the data, your best bet would be to make a copy anyway. Better safe than sorry.

[RAID 0]

I setup a RAID 1 (Mirror) for my parents when I built their computer. My understanding, it was supposed to mirror and exact copy of the main drive. It doesn't. There's a huge difference in disk usage. I've looked for options to fix this problem in the BIOS and the RAID BIOS, to no avail.

I think you're better off doing a straight backup, instead of a mirror.

[Krispy Kritter]

Sounds like something is wrong then. RAID 1 writes the same data onto all of the discs in the array. If one of the drives fails, the data is intact on the remaining discs. Simply replace the failed drive and the rebuild the array. Personally, I'd just perform backups and not take the performance hit.

[Odom Member]

Depends on the RAID controllers.

Some allow you to specify the drive that holds the data when you set up a RAID1. In this case, the 2nd HDD will be wiped and the existing data of HDD1 simply mirrored to HDD2. This might be in the books as online RAID migration.

Some do not allow for this. During the setup of RAID1 both HDD's will be wiped and only after this can you put your data on it. Which isn't very useful if you already have a disk with data you want to keep.

Read up in the manual which is the case, it should tell you