windows 7 software raid

[emosun]

might be an obvious question.....

but software raid isn't possible on a boot drive of a machine that doesn't support hardware raid.... because the board doesn't know the drives are in raid until the software is loaded.... which it can't load becuase it can't read the data on the drives......

do I got that right? I considered for a second doing software raid on some legacy machines for fun only to think it wouldn't actually work on a boot drive.

[Windows7ge]

If the file system supports software RAID then you can have a boot drive in software RAID. Don't know about Windows & NTFS though. I think you're right. You'd have to go Hardware RAID here.

 

I do believe Windows 7 has Storage Spaces though. I can't say if it lets you add the boot drive to a pool though. If it does then it'd be RAID in a sense.

 

In Disk Management you can create a spanned volume that spans multiple disks. A sort of RAID.

 

Traditional Software RAID though (0/1/5/6) I think you're out of luck.

[emosun]

20 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

If the file system supports software RAID then you can have a boot drive in software RAID. Don't know about Windows & NTFS though. I think you're right. You'd have to go Hardware RAID here.

 

I do believe Windows 7 has Storage Spaces though. I can't say if it lets you add the boot drive to a pool though. If it does then it'd be RAID in a sense.

 

In Disk Management you can create a spanned volume that spans multiple disks. A sort of RAID.

 

Traditional Software RAID though (0/1/5/6) I think you're out of luck.

you know what might work.....

software raid where the pc boots to a usb stick , the usb stick only contains the software needed for the board to identify the software raid setup , then boots to the raid volume.

I've seen it with encryption of course , a tiny bit of software loads before windows to decrypt the drive so the board can see the installation . wonder if that would also work to "decrypt" a software raid setup as a boot drive.

[Windows7ge]

38 minutes ago, emosun said:

you know what might work.....

software raid where the pc boots to a usb stick , the usb stick only contains the software needed for the board to identify the software raid setup , then boots to the raid volume.

I've seen it with encryption of course , a tiny bit of software loads before windows to decrypt the drive so the board can see the installation . wonder if that would also work to "decrypt" a software raid setup as a boot drive.

I could see that working for a RAID volume that doesn't have it's own way of initializing but the bigger problem would be that the RAID function in itself is missing. That is unless the software on the thumb drive is what controls the RAID.

 

If I was dead-set on building something like this I would probably cheat and virtualize it. Linux w/ software RAID and a good hypervisor. Pass-though everything Windows needs. It'd have the larger boot volume and the performance bump.