Will Windows 7 Allow Software RAID 1 (for non boot drives)?
I'm building a new Media Server / NAS Computer that will store all of my data on it for the network. I plan on doing regular backups of important data, however, I would like some redundancy via software RAID 1. My boot drive will be a separate 200 GB IDE Drive and I plan on purchasing 2-1.5 TB drives to be run in software raid 1 for my media. Will Windows 7 allow me to run these 2 hard drives (and perhaps other sets of mirrors) in Software RAID 1 or will I be forced to run everything in Windows XP? No.. I do not want to pay for windows server anything, I'd like to use what I have.
July 30th, 2009 11:56pm

Alaskan - Yes.. Provided you install the driver during the installation phase.
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July 31st, 2009 3:26am

Where at in the Win 7 installation process would this option be? I'd like to try and set everything up in Win 7 RC and migrate over to the full version of Win 7 when it becomes available Oct. 22nd.
July 31st, 2009 4:08am

I recently set up a 500GB barracuda 7200.11 raid1 mirror under server 2k8 and then unplugged the drives and plugged them into a windows 7 ultimate box. I installed the OS on a single 300GB barracuda 7200.10 boot drive and the mirror detected without any configuration required. My thinking is that if you have all three drives connected and install the OS on the 200GB drive, you will be able to setup the mirror on the other two without an issue. Hope this helps!
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August 13th, 2009 6:03pm

That does help, did you have to break the mirror before setting them up in Windows 7? Or will Software Mirrors be recognized from older versions of the Windows OS?
August 13th, 2009 6:07pm

During Windows 7 installation phase, there is an option to allow you to "Load Driver", you should first download the RAID driver and put it in a USB thumb drive or CD-ROM or floppy disk which allows Windows 7 to "load" it before the installation. Since you are setting the RAID 1 in the data disk, you could also install Windows 7 first and then load the RAID driver later in Windows 7 !
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September 3rd, 2009 11:01am

Did anyone actually even read your question? The replies here are ridiculous. You asked a very simple question (in fact the same one I have): Will Windows 7 Allow Software RAID 1 (for non boot drives)? You then get this answer: "Yes.. Provided you install the driver during the installation phase." - This is ridiculous! You asked about OS software RAID. Obviously this person either did not read yor question or has no clue because no driver is required. That makes absolutley NO SENSE AT ALL. This is OS Software RAID (for people who may not have hardware RAID controllers!)Then you get this: "My thinking is that if you have all three drives connected and install the OS on the 200GB drive, you will be able to setup the mirror on the other two without an issue. Hope this helps!" - Well that is nice of this person to root for the success, but this assumption proves to not work in real life. At least he admitted it to only be a thought.Just to let you know, I am running Windows 7 Home Premium. I want to Mirror two PATA 300GB NON BOOT drives. I have converted each of them to dynamic disks (required to mirror in the OS) and NO WHERE do I have the option to create a mirror. One thing I have considered isOS Software RAIDmay be limited to only the boot partition (which, for testing,I will not convert my boot drive to dymanic as this is a dual boot system AND tha particular driveis already hardware RAID 1 via the SATA controller). It could posibly be that mirroring is not an option on 7 home premium. I cannot find verification of this either.
November 20th, 2009 7:44am

It appears that Windows 7 Home Premium does not support mirroring. If you look at the CLI command DISKPART, it implies that you can mirror a volume, even though the GUI disk management application doesn't mention mirroring. you SELECT a volume, then ADD it to another disk to create a mirror. Great, I thought... but when you run it, the ADD command informs you that "the command you selected is not available with this version of windows". Not sure what Windows 7 Professional does, but XP Professional reports the same thing. Very irritating, especially as they seem to support striping. Now I'm wondering if there's any registry hacks to convince it that it should support mirroring...
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November 23rd, 2009 12:18pm

I'm running Windows 7 Professional, and it does natively allow both striped and mirrored dynamic disks. My striped disks are on a non-boot volume, but I believe it does work on boot volumes too. Apparently it just needs to be set up after installation -- convert the disk to a dynamic disk and then mirror it. Also note that you don't need to install any special drivers to get this to work. The only time that you'd need a driver is to get Windows to support a raid controller. Also sgjohnston is correct - Windows XP Professional did not natively support any form of software RAID, although server did. There was a hack floating around (http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-xp/how-to-add-software-raid-5-support-for-windows-xp/) to enable it in Professional, but later service packs have probably broken it.
November 26th, 2009 12:06pm

Gday everyone, Just to add my experience, I'm running win7 enterprise and have mirrored my boot volume onto a secondary harddrive with no issues (yep I know the original question was for non boot volumes but figured someone may find this post useful). Converted both disks to dynamic, right click on the boot C:partition in disk management, click 'add mirror' select your secondary harddisk to mirror onto and its good to go !
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December 4th, 2009 2:34am

Some time ago in Vista, I setup a 3 disk RAID 0 array of three 35gb non-boot partitions (three partial partitions on three different physical drives) and then did an in place upgrade to Win 7 Professional. That worked. The Win 7 drivers for NVIDIA then overvolted the graphics card (fried it) and I decided to do a fresh install. Win 7 found the RAID array again and everything was fine after reinstall. Then, I added some more drives to the system, plugging the original three into different SATA ports on the mainboard. On firing up the system with the new drives, Win 7 had to reconstruct all the indexes for all files on the array (DOS-like screen pre-OS boot listing index entries reconstructed). This took about 20 minutes. The system started fine and the array (which I install all my applications on for faster performance) worked dandy! Sean
December 4th, 2009 10:25pm

Hi all, just signed up here to report my story with Windows 7 and Raid1 . Hope there is some useful information in it for others that suffer…… My Hardware (I am doing a fresh install): DELL PowerEdge 1800 Server with 1 XEON CPU 2.8GHz 1GB Memory LSI 1020/1030 SCSI Controller 2 x Seagate ST373207 SCSI Disks Adaptec 39160 SCSI Controller 73GB Tape Drive Installed Windows 7 Professional 64 on Drive0 without adding any drivers . NOTE : Special case with this DELL Server : When I had the “OS Installation“ Switch set to ON in the BIOS I got a message at bootup that I only had 256KB left to work with, which in turn ended the installation shortly after it began with a blue screen. I set it back to OFF, then the installation went all the way to the end. Used a blank Seagate ST373207 as Disk0. When everything looked fine I converted Disk0 to Dynamic and tried to add RAID1 functionality by using another blank Seagate ST373207 as Disk1. But that option was always greyed out, no matter what Disk1 was set to. After reading thru the net for hours I finally gave up. The Windows Help offered only striping as an option….. Got me a 30 days evaluation copy of “Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 Suite” and created a full Disk0 copy into an archive on Disk1, which was by now my drive D:, and also burned a Recovery CD and had it checked by the program afterwards. All green. Then I discovered that there is a simple disk cloning function in that program suite as well. I decided to test that too, but on a different drive in the Disk1 slot. Shut down the computer and replaced the drives in the Disk1 carrier with the same model. Powered on again and had now 3 entities showing up: Disk0 dynamic ==> my drive C: Disk1 basic ==> new disk with 2 volumes of different sizes, one small DOS, one big nothing Disk2 dynamic ==> my former drive D: with Status MISSING I deleted the 2 volumes on Disk1 and also deleted the Disk2 entry. For curiosity sake at this point I right clicked on Disk0 and there it was: MY OPTION TO ADD A MIRROR Did that right away before Windows 7 Professional would change its mind ;-) It took about 20 minutes to resync and all looks fine now. Resyncing rate in this configuration was something like 3GB/min on a single SCSI channel with 320 Transfer Rate drives. My best guess is that Windows needs to know about more than 2 drives at start up to even consider offering mirroring. Just one more strange behaviour of W7: We tried to install an older version of the program “Weight Watchers FlexPoints” and failed. W7 denied the installation. Workaround: After setting the Desktop View to “Windows Classic” the installation went thru and resetting back to W7 style afterwards did do no harm, still working. But W7 installed it in "Program Files X86 ". Copied the personal databases from the old XP PC into this new location on W7 and the program wouldn’t find any personal data and kept asking to create a new user first. Workaround: Moved the whole directory over to "Program Files ", changed the settings in the desktop icon and all is thumbs up now.
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December 24th, 2009 7:41pm

To add to this, I now know for sure Windows 7 Home Premium does not support drive mirroring. So your evaluation is absolutley correct. You must have Windows 7 Pro or greater. This isn't a feature you will find anywhere in a bulleted comparison of the different version. I have found out the very very very long way (and I am running Ultimate now). My upgrade to Ultimate has nothing to do with my attempt to mirroring, yet it has further solidified my investigation. To prevent confusion here, I am talking about OS software mirroring within Disk Management. This has nothing to do with hardware RAID. Thanks.
January 3rd, 2010 5:39pm

Hello Guys I have question I own laptop and it does NOT support RAID via BIOS so i have to use Win 7 (Ult. 64 BIT) right ? I have primary SSD 128GB and Secondary is just HDD 320 GB I have a question : Can I pair these drives ? Or how to make RAID 0 with these two Disks ? In near future I will order second SSD 128GB and then I will pair them .. Will I be able to make RAID 0 in disk management and increase performance? Thnx a Lot
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March 20th, 2010 2:06am

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I CANNOT get Software Mirroring to work. I'm running Windows-7 ULTIMATE (64-bit), Quad processor (3.0 GHz), 8GB ram, 1TB system disk (basic disk [SATA]), four 2TB drives [SATA] (all four drives are IDENTICAL model drives). Each drive will format perfectly as basic drives, but when I build them as Mirrors (using Disk Management) - two mirrored 2TB pairs - I get the "Failed Redundancy" error (although the drive letters mount, and the mounted drives appear to be functioning [can read/write data on those drive letters]). This is just CRAZY! It should NOT take this much trouble-shooting to create a software mirror!wardmd
April 14th, 2010 2:48am

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I CANNOT get Software Mirroring to work. I'm running Windows-7 ULTIMATE (64-bit), Quad processor (3.0 GHz), 8GB ram, 1TB system disk (basic disk [SATA]), four 2TB drives [SATA] (all four drives are IDENTICAL model drives). Each drive will format perfectly as basic drives, but when I build them as Mirrors (using Disk Management) - two mirrored 2TB pairs - I get the "Failed Redundancy" error (although the drive letters mount, and the mounted drives appear to be functioning [can read/write data on those drive letters]). This is just CRAZY! It should NOT take this much trouble-shooting to create a software mirror!wardmd What motherboard are you using ? If your motherboard southbridge chipset supports RAID functionality, I would suggest you to use the motherboard's software RAID feature.
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April 14th, 2010 5:39am

Hello Guys I have question I own laptop and it does NOT support RAID via BIOS so i have to use Win 7 (Ult. 64 BIT) right ? I have primary SSD 128GB and Secondary is just HDD 320 GB I have a question : Can I pair these drives ? Or how to make RAID 0 with these two Disks ? In near future I will order second SSD 128GB and then I will pair them .. Will I be able to make RAID 0 in disk management and increase performance? Thnx a Lot You need 2 drives with identical size (preferably also in identical brands and models) to form the RAID group. If you form the RAID group for different size of the hard disks, the RAID group will ONLY use the smallest size as the RAID volume (in your case, 128GB). I am NOT sure if you can form a RAID group with SSD and HDD or not.
April 14th, 2010 5:51am

Hello Guys I have question I own laptop and it does NOT support RAID via BIOS so i have to use Win 7 (Ult. 64 BIT) right ? I have primary SSD 128GB and Secondary is just HDD 320 GB I have a question : Can I pair these drives ? Or how to make RAID 0 with these two Disks ? In near future I will order second SSD 128GB and then I will pair them .. Will I be able to make RAID 0 in disk management and increase performance? Thnx a Lot So far I know is that SSD a totaly other controller than a HDD so I don't think that it can be I can be totaly worng sorry than.
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June 9th, 2010 9:50pm

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 18:50:05 +0000, Radioth wrote: > I own laptop and it does NOT support RAID via BIOS so i have to use Win 7 (Ult. 64 BIT) right ? > > I have primary SSD 128GB and Secondary is just HDD 320 GB > > I have a question : Can I pair these drives ? > > Or how to make RAID 0 with these two Disks ? > > In near future I will order second SSD 128GB and then I will pair them .. > > Will I be able to make RAID 0 in disk management and increase performance? > > Thnx a Lot > > So far I know is that SSD a totaly other controller than a HDD so I don't think that it can be I can be totaly worng sorry than. My experience with RAID 0 and my view of it is that any increase in performance it provides is so slight as to be unnoticeable. Moreover, with SSDs instead of HDs, it will do next to nothing for you. Its main effect will simply be that it doubles your risk of losing everything on it. Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003 Ken Blake
June 10th, 2010 12:30am

did any one come up with an answer? i want to run 2x500gb drives, mirrored to store my media(mostly audio) and a 500gb in ide to run operating system/optical drive. installed board drivers/software, but cannot "see" array, only in disk management. cannot assign it a drive letter, cannot access array. same problem i had in win7 home premiun. reformatted and installed win7 pro. no difference. it is an oem copy that is activated. don't think a reinstall is an option. used floppy to install drivers. it is a asus m4a89td pro.
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June 13th, 2010 7:05pm

dbarnesco, The original post / question was if Windows 7 allows RAID 1 for non boot drives. In other words, does Windows 7 allow SOFTWARE RAID 1 (Mirroring). The answer is: Yes, Windows 7 Pro and up allows for software RAID 1. Windows 7 Home Premium does not support drive mirroring. From your post, I feel I must emphasize OS mirroring has absolutley nothing to do with drivers, controllers, your BIOS, your firmware, or anything else related to your hardware.
June 14th, 2010 5:08am

I did it just like dbarnesco stated. I use a family desktop to manage files, software, movies, and music. I network the desktop with my wireless modem, and an inexpensive 8 port 10/100/1000 Frys brand switcher to other desktop & laptop computers in my home. I built a new system to replace an older xp system, which used an existing 80GB c: drive and a raid1 card and JAVA GUI to manage two 500GB drives f: (I ran out of space). My new system has a 100GB primary boot drive/local disc for my Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit OS and miscellaneous software, and then two 1.5TB mirrored drives. Windows 7 allowed me to mirror (raid1) the 1.5TB drives in about 2 minutes, it was very easy (I originally tryed to use the raid capability of my Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 motherboard, but it crashed windows 7). I installed my operating system onto the 100GB drive (I keep all my software and OS on a small drive, and then I create a clone of this small system drive using Acronis, as a fail safe in case my OS becomes corrupt, I just pop in my little back up drive, and good as new). Then I attached my two 1.5 TB drives to my motherboard. I restarted my system. I right clicked on COMPUTER in the START menu and chose MANAGE. Then click Disk Management under Storage on the left. My primary disk is Disk 0 (c:), and the two new 1.5TB disks are Disk 1 and Disk 2. I followed the prompts to activate the drives, and then was allowed to chose MIRROR under the ACTION tab at the top. I just chose disk 1 and 2 to be mirrored, and assigned a drive letter (F:). It seems to be working fine. During this build, I came across a neat installer app that automatically loads all of the little free apps which can take a while to install like ccleaner, chrome, vlc, and many others. Do an internet search for NINITE. I think you might find it a time saver when building a new system.
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August 22nd, 2010 6:06pm

Hope this doesn't unduly upset any folks that have been struggling with this topic for a while, but I just set up a mirrored volume on Window 7 Ultimate 32-bit using 2 identical 1Tb Seagate SATA drives and the whole process took less than 90 seconds. The native "help" files are not very helpful, but with a little luck I found this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776202(WS.10).aspx followed the instructions, and badda-bing - one mirrored volume. Tip: (don't recall if they mentioned this) format both drives, then remove the volumes from both in the DiskManager. Right click on the first drive and you will get the option to create a mirror and get asked for the location of the mirror (the second drive).
August 26th, 2010 3:11am

And don't forget the part about being able to give more money to Microsoft because only the Professional or Ultimate level of Windows 7 supports RAID 0 or 1. If you are a Home user, you can't set up either RAID 0 or 1, just like in Windows XP Home.
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September 13th, 2010 4:03am

With Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise - which is probably equivalent to Windows 7 professional, I was trying to mirror two non system volumes finding the Add Mirror Greyed out. Solution? I shrank the volume by 20GB on a 1TB drive and now the Add Mirror shows up. Oddly wonderful!
March 4th, 2011 5:59pm

With Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise - which is probably equivalent to Windows 7 professional, I was trying to mirror two non system volumes finding the Add Mirror Greyed out. Solution? I shrank the volume by 20GB on a 1TB drive and now the Add Mirror shows up. Oddly wonderful! Thank you, thank you, thank you !!! This fixed my problem. I shrank the volume by only 1MB and Add Mirror appeared. This is a Windows7 glitch. I have had the same two disks mirrored in the past without the need to have a spare 1MB I had 2 identical disks originally partitioned and formatted as a mirrored pair on a Windows XP Pro system. That system was upgraded to Vista and the mirror imported. Since then the disks were moved to a new Win7-Ultimate system and again imported. All worked fine. When I needed extra space a while back I broke the mirror and used one drive for temporary use. After I'd finished with it I wanted to restore the mirror so deleted the temporary volume but got the dredded grey "add mirror". Both drives are WDC-WD15EADS-00P8B0-01.00A01.
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March 17th, 2011 1:20pm

Have you given up Alaskan57? To use what is available with Windows 7, you will need to make the two 1.5tb (non-boot)drives dynamic disks and create a mirror. Your total storage will be 1.5tb with those two drives due the mirror configuration. That should provide the redundancy of the storage that you require utilizing what is available in Windows 7. Here is a reference for dynamic disks: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758035(WS.10).aspx Search the library further for mirroring techniques and issues. Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise have all features included.
March 17th, 2011 1:49pm

YouTube video for Configuring WIndows 7 Software RAID http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKDCmOBqNBY If you are wanting to configure RAID 0 or 1, then I suggest using the RAID functions built into your motherboard BIOS if you dont want to purchase any additional Controller. Utilizing the RAID functions of your Mobo would be more effecient than a software raid.
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May 7th, 2011 7:25am

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