Some Questions About Drive Mirroring

hello all.

i have been reading about drive mirroring, called raid 1 by some, and there is a lot of conflicting information out there and even in this forum. these questions have been asked before but as i said the answers differ when they shouldnt. i appreciate any help you can give.

So i have 100+ drives of various shapes and sizes going back to the days of MFM. time to sort this stuff out i think. i looked into drive mirroring because i want redundancy while sorting this mess out. i plan on buying 3 identical drives, probably 10 TB each, the system does not matter, probably whatever motherboard i have lying around with windows 7 on it. once i have everything consolidated, then i will look into backup solutions. for now, the redundancy is fine. so here comes the questions.

1. can i mirror the data drives only? - i usually set up my systems with a small boot drive and put everything else on another drive. i would like to keep it that way.

2. is there a loss of capacity when setting up a mirrored set of drives? - i have heard and read it to be 50% as the drive uses that for redundancy which doesnt make sense to me because a mirror is the redundancy.

3. will mirrored drives natively work on other systems should the motherboard fail? - this would only be to read and copy from them should a failure occur.

4. do mirrored drives have to be dynamic or can they be a basic disk?

thanks

samuria said:

You can mirror drives in win7 its self backup - How do I mirror a hard drive using Windows 7 Pro? - Super User
raid is limited by how you do in the bios windows or raid card

thanks but i alrady read that and many others. other than maybe the first disk needing to be dynamic the rest was of no help.

First of all, remember that the only thing RAID 1 protects against is hardware failure of one disk. It isn't useful against user error or malware attack for example, as any logical damage done to the data is promptly replicated by the RAID controller to both disk, destroying your "copy". But, should a single disk fail, you can have the second still have the data intact.

Now to the questions.

Funky Munky said:

1. can i mirror the data drives only? - i usually set up my systems with a small boot drive and put everything else on another drive. i would like to keep it that way.

You can arrange your disks in any way you like, including what you describe. Having a normal disk be the main one and a RAID array be a secondary, storage-only drive for extra safety on the data, but not on the system itself.

Funky Munky said:

2. is there a loss of capacity when setting up a mirrored set of drives? - i have heard and read it to be 50% as the drive uses that for redundancy which doesnt make sense to me because a mirror is the redundancy.

Those sayings are correct, sort of. In RAID 1, both drives end up storing exactly the same data, so that you have 2 copies of everything. But that uses up double the capacity for the same data, it's not wasted (it provides the redundancy) but it's certainly less eficient than a normal drive, space wise.
For example, with your two 10TB drives in RAID 1 (20TB in total), Windows will see a single 10TB drive for use, as it'll write the same thing twice.

Funky Munky said:

3. will mirrored drives natively work on other systems should the motherboard fail? - this would only be to read and copy from them should a failure occur.

I'm not entirely sure about the details of RAID 1, but I guess they'll work just fine when taken out of the array. Each one is ultimately storing the full information as if it was working individually, so putting it alone should show the original data.

Funky Munky said:

4. do mirrored drives have to be dynamic or can they be a basic disk?

No idea here, I'll let others comment on this.

thanks for all the info.