How do you set up a mirrored hard drive?

Question

Will the mirrored drive take over for a crashing drive? How does all this work? I want to learn how to protect myself and my data! Thanks!

Answer 1

There are two ways:

1. "Hardware RAID". Get a hard drive controller card that handles RAID 1. I bought one that does RAID 1 for SATA for around $40. Some motherboards have integrated RAID for either IDE or SATA (and sometimes SCSI). You'll have to build the RAID array before you put anything on that array. Should the array get unsynchronized, the time to resync is less than the alternative below. Most servers use hardware raid, but they use RAID 5 (with lots of disks) or higher.

2. "Software RAID". Most operating systems allow you to mirror a hard drive with their software. When the two drives become unsynchronized, it can take a long while for them to sync back up and your machine will be noticeably slower. Usually you can mirror a second drive to an existing first drive.

Answer 2

No. to establish a contemplated set of drives you're able to desire to establish between the mirroring RAID arrays. This demands 2 drives, in many circumstances of the comparable length and from the comparable producer. So i might first do some analyzing on the priority of RAID arrays.

Answer 3

buy a disk mirror utility,like ghost to clone your hard drive,but one thing you need to remember,you need to use the same computer because of the drivers,a cloned hard drive will be an exact copy of the original,also remember the hard drive jumper settings,how it is set as a default ,slave,cable select,or master.