New Raid one setup

[rocketseeker]

I have only 2 drives in my ws2003 computer. Drive 0 and Drive 1. Drive 0 which is the "C" drive has an OS and user files on it. Drive 1 is blank. Can i setup a raid 1 configuration without losing data or do i need to use two blank drives.

 

[sminlal]

The first question to ask is whether these are really two physical drives or whether they are two partitions on one physical drive. If you're not sure you can use Disk Manager to find out:

- Start -> right-click "Computer", select "Manage"
- Click "Disk Management" in the left pane
- Scroll down to the BOTTOM of the MIDDLE pane.

If "C:" and "D:" both appear in the same horizontal box, then you only have one drive and RAID is not possible. If they appear in two boxes with two different disk numbers beside them (i.e., "Disk 0" and "Disk 1"), when you have two drives and RAID may be possible.

If you have two drives, then you can set up RAID if your motherboard supports it. If your motherboard doesn't support RAID then you'd have to buy a RAID controller card to plug into your motherboard.

If you set up RAID-1 you WILL loose data because at the very least you'll be replicating all the data from one drive onto the other drive, thus overwriting its data. You need to think about how much storage you need and whether using your existing disks as a mirrored pair will leave you with enough storage space. For example, if you have a 300GByte and a 500GByte drive, RAID-1 will only give you 300GB of available storage (uses the size of the smallest drive).