Windows 7 - reliability of mirroring USB drives

How dependable is mirroring 2 external USB drives through disk management?

I found this excellent tutorial on Google that seems to have it completely covered.

Use Drive Mirroring for Instant Backup in Windows 7 - How-To Geek

The main thing to remember is that it's not foolproof in that if you lose data on one drive you lose it on the other as well, so you might want to consider backing up to an external drive as well.

my suggestion is not to mirror usb drives. they are mainly there for backup and portability of your files. more importantly about 30% of usb docks/enclosures/and portable drives fail. so if you just have the dock die on one of the drives you loose the data because as far as windows is concerned that drive is dead.

I saw that How To Geek tutorial, thats why I was asking about reliability. Nothing is as good as hardware RAID but I cant afford that. The redundancy of RAID 1 guards against physical disk failure. When one disk fails, the data on the mirrored disk is still intact. Are you saying that in this scenario the data saved to one USB drive should then be backed up to another? I just lost almost 500GB of video when the disk in a USB drive went down in flames.



The data has been written to both disks. How is the data lost when one enclosure/disk fails?

When one disk fails on a hardware RAID 1 array, data is still written to the remaining disk. Do you mean Window' software RAID wont do that because Windows only sees the array, not individual disks?

duh?

I can't see why it wouldn't be safe. Just as long as you still also have a viable backup plan going on top of the mirrorset, that is.

I think mirroring is a bad investment. Frequent backup, sync or imaging is less complex and more efficient overall. This can all be scheduled to run in the background whilst the mirror overhead you have all the time.