Win7 Ultimate (Software) RAID 0

[ScarEye]

Hello all,

I have two identical drives which are 2TB's each. What I would like to do is setup RAID 0, now the issue is I have converted both disks to dynamic disks, when I right click on the "unallocated" drive "New Striped Volume" is grayed out. UAC is turned off btw.

Can it be the size of the disks that is the issue?


Thank you for time, any comments or suggestions are much appreciated.

 

[13thmonkey]

its too late now as you've installed windows on it, perhaps mobo raid0 would be better. You need to do raid0 on two other drives and not the OS drive for windows raid0.

 

[ScarEye]

13thmonkey, thank you for the quick reply. Do you know if I can setup RAID 0 during the installation process? The mobo does not support any types of RAID

Thanks again.
ScarEye

 

[das_stig]

If motherboard doesn't support hardware raid, then you have no option but to use software raid.

As you already have the disks set as dynamic, you need to right-click on each partition on disk-0 and select raid level and reboot.

On startup, they will start to sync, this can take awhile and best not to use the pc as this will cause it to resynch again.

 

[The_Prophecy]

You're running into a couple of limitations here. First, MBR partitions (the kind that a BIOS can boot from and Windows can be installed to) must be under 2TB in size.

Since creating this RAID 0 array would require the volume to be set up as a GPT partition (GPT = GUID Partition Table), you would have to delete the volume and re-format the drive, which obviously you cannot do while you have an active copy of Windows running from that volume. Doing this offline would work, but you would not be able to boot from the GPT volume once you created it. Only EFI - or UEFI - based systems can do this (which is the second limitation).

 

[13thmonkey]

looks like I was wrong according to the stig, some say he knows how windows raid works.