Win 7 RAID and Drive Choice

[group6]

I recently lost almost 500GB of video and photos because an external USB drive went down in flames. That hurt. Time for redundancy. How reliable is Win 7 Ultimate's RAID 1 feature? Nothig is as good as hardware RAID but thats not in the cards right now. I bought 2 of Seagate's 2TB GoFlex Desk drives. Yeah USB 3.0 is nice but its useless if you dont have 3.0 at the other end. I also got 2 GoFlex Ultra Portables. They cost the same and the prices were the best Ive seen anywhere and I can return whichever I dont use. The portables are, well, portable, but I dont plan to be going out on the town with my data. Yes, the Desk's fall over because the base isnt stable enough, but not a problem if you dont stand them up, duh. And they have twice the space. No matter how good the warranty is, it aint gonna get me my data back. figured this would be an inexpensive RAID 1 solution. If Win 7 can deliver.

 

[Pyree]

I don't think raid works on usb drives on window 7 unless your enclosure supports it (the seagate go flex don't) or you use some special program.

 

[group6]

Well thats depressing. What am I gonna do with all these hard drives? Whats the next practical scheme? Writing to one drive and backing it up to the other is kinda like rubbing two sticks together. Any better ideas?

 

[group6]

Best answer selected by group6.

 

[Pyree]

You can raid it by software. Raid usb drives require more steps. It works by generating virtual SCSI HDD image file which takes up the entire HDD space. You install driver for the SCSI drives and program to mount the virtual drive image. Once the virtual HDD is mounted, it will be recognize by the driver and fool window to think the virtual drive image as a real internal drive and allow software raid. Just like raid, if you pull out the HDD and put them on another port, it will no longer work. I do not recommend this because of the steps you need to make it work, also it involves a lot of software and visualization solution so performance is not great.

Why don't you find a sync software and sync the two drives together?