Win7 says my RAID 1 is NOT fault tolerant?

[commissarmo]

Windows7 64 Disk Management tells me that my RAID 1 which is mounted on the mobo controller (as well as the RAID 10 I have on an Adaptec RAID card), is NOT Fault Tolerant.

Is this normal? I'm thinking that since Windows is not managing the RAID (and can't see the independent physical drives) it cannot know that they're in RAID anyway... and thus states that they're not fault tolerant (despite the Intel Controller claiming they're in RAID1.

I'm assuming that if you used Windows to configure a RAID 1 it would say it was Fault Tolerant?

 

[plasmastorm]

Not entirely sure about windows saying it is not fault tolerant, however running a raid config form an on board controller is a bad idea.
Any rad that my company has set up in the past using on board controllers failed within 8 months.
Strongly recommend running that from a dedicated quality card.

 

[sub mesa]

plasma: expensive hardware RAID like Areca likes to split arrays just as much as onboard fakeRAID does; so that shouldn't be a reason to go hardware RAID instead.

@OP: Windows does not know your 'volume' is a RAID-array; it would only know that if Windows performed the RAID itself. Now that you use Windows-only drivers to create a RAID array out of 2 SATA disks, all Windows can see is a "SCSI controller" with one big disk in it; without knowing anything about the physical properties or even that its constructed of multiple disks.

It should be noted though, that RAID1 in home situations have very little benefit. RAID1 means you can lose all your data simply by filesystem corruption/virusses/accidental deletion. RAID1 is often used as replacement for making backups; but it can not replace backups since RAID1 offers no 'history', and adds its own layer of failure. For common home setups, two separate disks where one disk is a backup, is a much safer configuration.

 

[commissarmo]

Ok thanks - I assumed as much.

I was going more for the "one harddrive suffers hardware failure and I have another ready more or less immediately" logic, but yes I clone everything as well (as well as make paper copies of as much documentation, code, research reports etc as I can, NAS storage copies, and 3rd location copies through CrashPlan (highly recommended).

My harddrive RAID 0 crashed last year... and while I had backups I still hated the reconfiguring of settings, etc.

Thanks.