Home Sata Raid 1


A_SN

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Jun 8, 2006
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I just lost a 500 GB hard drive. It died pretty unexpectedly, with a BSoD as a sole warning. Fortunately, it contained mainly just porn and TV shows, plus I had a "back up" from June on a 120 GB drive (the one drive it replaced which I hadn't sold or formatted yet because I'm a lazy bastard). Unfortunately, turns out the hard drive never had a warranty, which sucks.

Anyways, so now what I have is a (pretty full) 320 GB SATA drive containing the system, all my apps and all my documents (which I highly value), and also a pretty full 120 GB drive which contains most of the stuff that I download, be it porn or TV shows.

Now I can deal with the second drive dying, mostly that I don't even need to really back up, only save the tree to remember what I had (made a small `ls -R` based script for that purpose), but I'm very concerned about the main disk dying, which would be from my point of view a catastrophe. However I can't be arsed to manually back stuff up on DVDs, and I want a SATA RAID 1 solution, because I want to have a reliable storage for all my oh so important stuff.

But how do I set that up? I have an ASUS mobo with a Sil3112 SATA controller, with only two SATA ports. Can I for example replace my 120 GB hard drive with a 750 GB one, then on that 750 GB drive create a RAID 1 mirror partition of the 320 HD's partition and use the remaining 430 GB as a normal partition? Is it even possible? Does Windows XP cope with that sort of stuff correctly? Can I even turn a regular partition into a RAID 1 partition like this? Should I buy a dedicated SATA RAID controller? Are the odds than both HDs in RAID 1 mode fail at the same time serious enough? Or should I entirely go for another solution?
 
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