... or not to RAID.

[plonq]

Not only did your latest RAID attempt fail, but I have corrupted your main disk. Should I corrupt it more? (Y/N)

After a couple of attempts to rebuild the RAID1 on my computer, I have come away with a few more grey hairs, and a renewed resolve not to bother trying again. Both drives are working now, albeit non-RAID, and I think that I shall keep it that way. I am backing up the whole system to the second drive, and I am going to schedule Windows to do regular backups to the second drive. If I lose the first drive, I will have a full backup on the second. If I lose the second drive, I just need to replace that and create another backup. It's not as geeky as setting up a RAID would be, but it does the job I suppose.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I do both, actually. You should be able to install everythign on one drive, move to the Raid controller with that and an identical blank, then mirror to the blank without any problem.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Everything is installed on the one drive, and the other one has been reformatted (though it has a backup of the first drive on it now). I initially removed one of them from the RAID, but then it wouldn't let me add it back in. It gives me a "no room to add this drive" error.

I finally removed the second drive from the RAID, with the idea of adding them both back in again. That seems to want to work, except that I can't bring my self to click through the "WARNING: DOING THIS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON ALL OF YOUR DRIVES" part.

I've decided that if I really want to do a RAID, I'll buck up for a proper card rather than using this half-baked implementation on the motherboard.

[lowen-kind.livejournal.com]

I'm glad your remaining hair is only turning gray, and not falling out. :=3

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Were you trying a software or a hardware RAID?

I know there's probably not much good to say about the dynamic drive handling available on Windows. There's certainly a performance hit over hardware based systems. But presuming you are running Windows, it may be an option for you. I've had a system here at the office working fine for nearly 3 years. (Although I also back up the mirrored stack to another PC...just in case. I try to keep at least three copies of all the critical data.)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Hardware RAID, but using the half-baked RAID that came on this ASUS motherboard. It managed to degrade itself when I installed Windows on this machine. Both drives worked fine when I tried them individually, but when I booted up with the RAID, it gave me error messages at the BIOS level.

I considered rebuilding it and reinstalling Windows, but I figured it should be a pretty simple matter of just removing one drive from the RAID, cleaning it and moving it back in again. Removing it went smoothly, but the whole "add it back in again" part doesn't seem to be supported by this hardware.

I finally deleted the RAID entirely and am running as two independent drives. If I am faithful about making backups then it's all good IMO.

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Well, if you can't add a drive back after a failure; It kinda makes the trouble RAID worthless. Like you say, you're just as well off with a backup.

Aren't computers fun?