Mirror HD win 7

amdark

Distinguished
May 11, 2004
104
0
18,680
Hi, hope this is in right section.

I am building a computer for a friend and he wanted 3 1TB HD's 1st disk for OS and software 2nd for data and 3rd to mirror 2nd disk.

So i went to "My Computer" after building the rig and only saw one drive listed (drive 1 with windows 7 installed to it) So i went to "Computer Management" > "Storage Tab" > "Disk Management". Saw the 3 drives listed and proceeded to Mirror Disk 2 and 3. I believe the process completed hoping that was the right way to do this. However now in "My Computer" i only see 2 drives, my local disk with my OS on it 1TB of space and another disk which i believed i mirrored and renamed the volume to "Data" with 1TB of space.

If my mirror process was done correctly should i only see 2 disks?

This is my first time mirroring a hard drive and wanted to make sure i did things correctly.
 
You'll see three disks in "Disk Manager" but only two disks in "My Computer". "My Computer" shows "logical disks" as drive letters, while "Disk Manager" shows the real, actual disks.

In "Disk Manager" you should see two of the disks with the same drive letter on both. When you write data to folders on that drive letter, the data is actually written to both disks.
 
The biggest functional advantage of doing in hardware is that you're able to boot from a RAID set. But that isn't required for a data drive anyway.

The advantage of doing it using Windows is that the drives should be portable to any Windows installation - something that's often an issue with hardware-based RAID.