Help with a mirroring question, please.

I read alot here, but never really found an answer to my question.
I have an Intel Desktop Board DX48BT2, its supports about everything.
Intel Desktop Board DX48BT2 - Overview
I have Windows7 64bit ultimate.

My C drive is a 300 gig raptor and I don't want to change that.

I want to install both of my new drives.
I just bought (2) WD2001FASS 2TB SATA.
WD Caviar Black, Desktop Hard Drives
2 TB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 7200 RPM
WD Caviar Black 2 TB SATA Hard Drives ( WD2001FASS )

I want to put all my pictures and movies on one of the drives
and have the other drive mirror it, for backup purposes.
Can I do that with these (2) drives and if so how do I format them?

my bios has been set to support the drives.

thanks very much!

Jag

I assume your C partition will contain both Windows and all installed programs and that the 2 new drives will contain ONLY data???

If that is true, just get a file by file backup program to copy everything on Caviar 1 to Caviar 2. These programs run on a schedule or manually at will.

There are numerous programs to do that--some free and some not. I would just use a single NTFS partition on each drive.

I use Second Copy for this purpose, but you can google a bunch of choices with search terms like "synchronize folders" or "file backup", etc.

You could use imaging, but I wouldn't as that just introduces another layer of complexity that could go wrong at precisely the wrong time.

I'm not sure that using RAID 1 (mirroring) is a good data protection method, but I'll leave it up to you to research that.

You have two choices: software and hardware RAID.

For software, see:

Information regarding Windows 7 software Raid : Alan's World Famous Blog V2

You could also do RAID based on your ICH9R SATA controller. That would require setting your SATA controlller mode to RAID in the BIOS settings, and then adding the two drives to an array in the RAID submenu. I imagine that's covered in the motherboard's manual (download it if you don't have it in hand).

I haven't used RAID in quite a while, though. I used a RAID 10 setup, but found it so annoying that I gave it up. (The array needed to be re-verified after every system crash. That could take hours. The machine was still usable during that, but with competition for the hard disk access.)