Help with Raid Setup.

YellowPizzav2 · November 1, 2018

Hello, I have two WD Black 4 TB that I would like to put in raid 1. I have never done anything like this before but I recently had a drive fail on me and it cost me a boatload to recover only 30% of the data. One of the drives is a replacement drive for the old computer that I switched over to the new one and would like to keep the files on. I have another WD Black 4 TB that I have used a bit but I would now like to run them in RAID. Is a RAID controller necessary or can the windows handle it by itself? I would also like to keep the data on my current drive that I am using while turning it into a RAID array. Thanks in advance!

LukeSavenije · November 1, 2018

windows can do it just fine. but know the lifespan of a harddrive is around 5 years on averadge (for me much longer, but some not).

NumLock21 · November 1, 2018

Most mid-range boards with enthusiast chipset or a tier lower will support RAID. Check your motherboard specs to see if RAID is supported or not. Next is, you will need to first back up the data from the drives, you want for your RAID setup because, RAID will destroy all the data that's on the drive. Once your data are backup to a drive, not used for the RAID, then you can proceed with the RAID setup. To setup a RAID configuration, both drives needs to be the same size, if one drive is smaller than the other, RAID will configure based on the smaller size drive. Go into the bios, SATA controller, and enable RAID. When you're doing, save & exit. A prompt will appear asking you to press a combo key, this will take you to the RAID utility. From here just pick the RAID you want, select the drives you want for the RAID. When all is good, save the configuration and that's it.

Installing the OS or using it as a backup is the same way as a non-raid drive.

seagate_surfer · November 1, 2018

Windows can do it from disk management, the following is just an overview of the RAID configurations using the Microsoft knowledge base, but they call them in their tool different, just type RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. in the search bar of the MS site and you will see that documents about how to establish a Striped Volume (RAID 0), Redundant Arrays (RAID 1) and so on, something that I noticed is that they have everything documented as if it was for Windows server 2003 but it doesn't matter, the steps in disk management are the same:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/100110/overview-of-redundant-arrays-of-inexpensive-disks-raid

Alternatively you can use third party software to do the set up of the RAID array.