Useful Windows 7 feature
I just discovered that Windows 7 (pro and above I believe) has RAID 1 (mirroring) built in. You can even boot from it.
I’ve used this feature on a Windows Server in the past, but I believe this is the first time it has been released in a desktop operating system.
To get it working is pretty easy. Please note that this is only appropriate if Windows 7 is the only operating system that you are running on the system. Other operating systems may not be able to see the dynamic disks.
- Add a second hard drive of equal size to your first one – I recommend using the exact same model
- Open up Computer Management in Administrative Tools. Go to the Disk Manager.
- Right click each disk (make sure you right click the disk and not a partition on the disk) and convert it to a dynamic disk
- Right click each partition on the original hard drive, and select add mirror.
- Wait for disks to sync.
Also worth noting is that software mirrors created by Windows 7 will not auto rebuild. If a hard drive dies, you’ll have to replace the broken drive, boot off of the working drive, break and then recreate the mirror set (or so I’ve read). Even with this limitation, it was perfect for an older machine that I didn’t want to buy a RAID card for.
This is a great feature. Thanks for pointing it out. I have an issue with my computer. I once had a mirrored external drive using raid 1 with identical drives. The enclosure dropped and the SATA circuitry was damaged. Luckily I was able to read the data on both drives. I put them into my computer and tried to make them a mirror again. I ended up losing the partitions. After a rebuild of the partition I was able to see the data again on the drives. Since then I have been adding and deleting files independently of each drive. Do you know if this Windows 7 feature would work to sync the drives? Can I create a “master” drive and wipe the 2nd one and then sync? Or would I have to move the data to a 3rd drive, create the mirror and then restore it?
I don’t know if this would work with an external drive. I would certainly be worried that if it did work, it would have a large negative impact on hard disk performance.
I would get an internal hard drive. If not possible, the windows 7 backup program is far superior to the one included in XP. You may just want to schedule nightly backups to the external hard drive.
Between the nightly backup, and previous versions feature, you should have access to both older versions of your files on your system itself, and a full backup on the external hard drive if you suffer hardware failure.
You can also try SyncToy. Just be aware that the current version shouldn’t be used with a NAS (file corruption bug). Hopefully MS will release a newer version of SyncToy.
If you just want a simple file script, look into robocopy.