Best way to setup a bootable RAID1?

[TomSerious]

Hello!

 

So I will setup my home server soon, now I ask myself how to setup the Boot "RAID1 array" for the OS (Windows Server 2016).

I have 2 SSDs with ~250GB, where I would like to install the OS onto.

 

My motherboard supports BIOS/"firmware?" Raid (Intel RST enterprise SATA/SSATA option ROM Utility) (Board: Asus Z11PA-U12).

 

Should I just setup the RAID1 in the BIOS/Firmware?

Or is there a "better" way? (I know of other ways but not if they are better ^^)

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Sir Asvald]

Never ever do raid on your boot drives. If the raid fails or even one drive fails, you're screwed. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Abdul201588 said:

Never ever do raid on your boot drives. If the raid fails or even one drive fails, you're screwed. 

Did you read the above, they want raid 1, so any drive can fail and you can keep going.

 

 

For windows, you need hardware/firmware raid to have bootable raid. SO setup raid in the bios and your good.

 

But id personally not do this as the chance of a ssd failure is lower, and backups are they in that case. And using raid for boot often disables some features like trim. Just get a single good ssd(like a 860 evo).

[TomSerious]

2 hours ago, Abdul201588 said:

Never ever do raid on your boot drives. If the raid fails or even one drive fails, you're screwed. 

I actually have 2 x 960 Pro 1TB in RAID 0 (what you meant) in my gamig rig. If you don't keep any important data on there why not? the performance is incredible!

Daily backups are enough security for me ^^ (on the gaming rig)

53 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Did you read the above, they want raid 1, so any drive can fail and you can keep going.

 

 

For windows, you need hardware/firmware raid to have bootable raid. SO setup raid in the bios and your good.

 

But id personally not do this as the chance of a ssd failure is lower, and backups are they in that case. And using raid for boot often disables some features like trim. Just get a single good ssd(like a 860 evo).

 

Thank you!

I will probably only use one SSD now.

It would be possible btw, to create a RAID array in command prompt at the installation of windows ^^

[Sir Asvald]

57 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Did you read the above, they want raid 1, so any drive can fail and you can keep going.

 

 

For windows, you need hardware/firmware raid to have bootable raid. SO setup raid in the bios and your good.

 

But id personally not do this as the chance of a ssd failure is lower, and backups are they in that case. And using raid for boot often disables some features like trim. Just get a single good ssd(like a 860 evo).

Sorry, My tiredness did not help, No sleep for 2 days.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, TomSerious said:

It would be possible btw, to create a RAID array in command prompt at the installation of windows ^^

Well due to how the boot process works you can't do it in software. You can't have the boot parititons in a raid 1, as the uefi/bios doesn't know about software raid and the boot partition needs to be a simple fat32 partition, you can have it clone it over, but thats get messy and isn't true raid 1.

 

You can mirror the boot partition, but you still can't boot if one drives failes, it has all the c data, but not the boot loader,

 

And you don't have to do it in the installer, you can make it a mirrored boot volume later on when ever you want.

 

Also windows dynamic disk raid 1 is pretty bad as it won't stripe reads like most other software and is the same speed as a single drive.