Spanned/Striped System drive on Windows 7

seamus · 10-03-2011 2:50pm #1

Right, just asking a quick question here. I'm using the onboard RAID 5 on my motherboard at present, but as far as I can tell Windows 7 x64 doesn't like the driver and I'm experiencing frequent crashing and corruption over and over. The disks are otherwise fine, so it must be the on board RAID.

So I'm going to switch the drives back to 4 plain old SATA drives, but I'd like to span/stripe them so I don't have to work with 4 different drives. I haven't done software RAID on Windows in a while and the last time I did it (on Server 2003), you couldn't make the OS drive a dynamic disk. Is this still the case? I'd prefer just to have one large drive rather than one OS drive and another RAID.

Availability's not really a concern anymore as I'm keeping a regular backup of the data.

12-03-2011 10:46pm

I believe this is still the case, you can't stripe the OS volume as the boot loader wouldn't be able to read the stripe before the kernel loads. I'm not sure about spanning but it's probably not possible either.

seamus · 14-03-2011 12:13pm

Correct, now that I've tried it. Can't span/stripe/raid the system volume

Capt'n Midnight · 15-03-2011 10:45pm

just create a small mirrored system volume and use the rest for striping you could put pagefile / temp folder on the "unused" space on the unmirrored part of the drives

seamus · 16-03-2011 8:48am

Yeah, I've striped the other drives and I'm using it for pagefiles/swapfiles/scratchfiles as well as storing music and the like.

astrofool · 16-03-2011 4:17pm

Using an x58 system here, and have no problems raid'ing the system volume with Windows 7. (did run into the 2TB limit per partition though

)

16-03-2011 4:56pm

astrofool wrote: »

Using an x58 system here, and have no problems raid'ing the system volume with Windows 7. (did run into the 2TB limit per partition though )

But are you using the Intel Matrix/RST RAID rather than the Windows dynamic disk RAID?

astrofool · 18-03-2011 4:07pm

Yep, using the Intel RAID, comment withdrawn

Have you tried a RAID 10, or RAID 0, with a seperate drive for backups? A lot of controllers can be more finicky with RAID 5 due to the extra horsepower needed to work out the parity.

Capt'n Midnight · 18-03-2011 8:00pm

astrofool wrote: »

RAID 0,

:eek:

it gets it's name from the exact number of files you'll recover if one of the drives dies :P

astrofool · 20-03-2011 3:16pm

I've been running a RAID 0 for 10 years now, without a failure (*touch wood*), however, I have a completely seperate drive in the system which I do a nightly backup of my(as in, non OS/program) files to. When I have had to reinstall (windows XP/Vista/7/HD/Hardware upgrades) this is all I've ever needed, and I can stand to lose a day of backup vs. the constant perf/maintenance hit of running in a RAID5 or mirror.

The really irreplaceable data is either network backed up, or shared around multiple computers (pictures, home movies).

My next upgrade will likely be RAID 0 SSD, and all I'll have on them will be the OS and programs in the first place.

Spanned/Striped System drive on Windows 7

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