raid software

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can anyone reccomend good raid software, i was gonna buy some hardware but seems less bother just using software. also do the two drives (im gonna mirror) need to be the exact same ie speed , capacity, cache, brand etc?

Thanks all

 

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for which OS ?

As you may know windows xp has built-in RAID 0 (RAID 1 (mirror) and 5 (stripped + parity) are in server products only)

Windows 7 has Raid 1 (Mirror) in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions.

"also do the two drives (im gonna mirror) need to be the exact same ie speed , capacity, cache, brand etc?"

Not in most modern Raid systems however it does help.

I would look at hardware if you can its heaps better.

 

Umm I think perhaps you have got a little confused.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

As far as mirrored drives are concerned (actually, any normal raid is concerned) the maximum size of the mirrored\raided partition will always been the size of the smallest disk.

If you have 2 drives, 1 of them a 1tb drive, the other a 250gb drive, the largest partition you can get would be 250gb (or so), you can't have more drive space than you have actual physical disk space.

Also you should be aware that the vast majority of OS's these days will allow you to software raid, these range from Windows XP through to Windows 2008R2, also not forgetting the various Linux\BSD packages out there.

If you're after however NAS\SAN software that's a different kettle of fish.

Explain what it is you're trying to do and we can see what we can do for you.

 

hi guys am buying a small server to store some business stuff on it comes with a 160gb sata hdd but i was going to buy a second disk for it same spec and run mirroring on it just to be on the safe side if one of the disks died on me. how hard is it to set a mirror setup using server?
cheers

 

Why will you be storing it on a server?

Dave

 

so a few folk in the office can work on it over a peer - peer network

 

OK, first things first. A mirrored drive is usually only done for mission critical servers where you are mirroring the OS disk (you would edit the ARC paths in the boot.ini to change the boot path for the second drive if you ever needed to boot from that).

I would honestly suggest that if you have important business files you either invest in some dedicated backup and storage or decide to go down the route of Cloud Based storage with the likes of SkyDrive from MS.

The thing you really need to ask yourself though is how much is your data worth? if it's business critical then spend the money on decent storage, if it's not then use USB and online backups.

 

what sort of numbers?

peer to peer i would just use a online service like jungle disk.
you could also robocopy to another computer in the workgroup for an extra local backup for quicker recovery times.

you could also look into a dedicated NAS device with online backup support built in.