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Disk Mirroring on Windows Server 2003

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by boardin4life85

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Hi, I am looking into doing some RAID 1 disk mirroring for our Windows 2003 Server box and I had a couple questions come up. We had two hard drives on our server. One drive C: holds the operating system, a swap partition and an unallocated partition...and then we have another drive F: that is our network drive that the office can access from their computers. Is it possible to create a mirrored drive that contains both of the other two hard drives, or would I have to create two separate mirrored drives. If it is possible, how do I go about doing this. Also do you know if the system would a big performance hit. We want to have a mirrored drive in case the other drives go down and we can just boot back from the mirrored drive. Thanks for your help.

Ross

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by churdoo

I'm assuming that you're talking about a W2K3 software RAID, or at least I'll talk about that first.

The W2K3 software RAID functionality is on a per volume basis, in other words, you would have one RAID 1 mirroring your C: volume onto a separate drive with sufficient capacity, and then a second RAID 1 mirroring your F: drive. The W2K3 software RAID will indeed affect performance, how much depends on the specs of the server and disk subsystem, but there certainly will be a difference.

If the server has a hardware RAID controller, this is the way to go, and you could hypothetically have a single RAID 1 on a pair of disks, and have both of your volumes reside on that array. Performance of hardware RAID is better since the array processing is handled by the processor on the RAID controller and not the system CPU. Of course converting to hardware RAID at this stage of the game presents its own challenges.

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