So consider a real backup (non-hot (and preferably off-site) external drive, online backups, etc). Anything else (corruption, accidental deletion, malware/ransomware, etc) won't help at all. Not sure if you have backups or not, but if your data is important, and you think mirroring saves you, it only saves you from a single disk failure scenario. Converting from dynamic to basic doesn't seem overly difficult, but yeah this would be adding a few more steps to your basic setup.Īll that said.
I'm not sure which I don't like more now, dynamic disks or hw raid. you'd have to break the raid and convert back to basic disk to use a tool like gparted or clonezilla. Oh, I just quickly looked and gparted/clonezilla don't work with dynamic disks. (if hw/basic disks, use gparted, else can do within windows). When all is confirmed working, delete e: volume (data partition on old disks) and expand c to fill the disks. Boot up/mirror the drives, change old d: to e:, and new drive/volume to d: (might need to reboot first). except with all 4 disks available, boot gparted, copy (not move) d-drive data volume to one of the 4tb disks. Your data disks are more important than OS - it's pretty easy to rebuild an OS, compared to trying to recover the data. Physical separation of data and os disks is good in practice. (Are you replacing the two disks or can you run with all 4?) If you go the dynamic disk route, you can likely just pop the disk in, mirror to it, break the mirror, and convert it to your primary disk.Īlternative: run the os on the 2x1tb (c:, mirrored) and data on 2x4tb (d:, mirrored). Move that disk to primary and use the os (windows disk management) to mirror to the second disk. And then clone the disk to the new one, it should see both partitions to clone and expand. Boot from a clonezilla or gparted (better in my opinion) live CD. Simplest would be to replace the second 1tb disk with your new 4tb disk (if you have hw raid, now would be the time to disable it).
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(I assume windows 2k8 server has this for software 'mirroring' - it does or here too.) so you'd have to understand the risks and tradeoffs. I guess moving to "dynamic disks" is different than just software disk mirroring. Here's a good breakdown of using windows software mirroring.
The primary issue is you're likely going to lose any disk hot-swapping functionality, if it was there before. In windows, that seems to mean 'Dynamic Disks'. Software raid isn't very "expensive" anymore, and OSes can handle it quite seamlessly without noticeable lag and replacing an OS disk is far easier than replacing a hw raid controller. but imo, hardware raid gets more complex longer term - if the raid controller dies, you likely need at least the sane brand if not similar model controller to manage the volumes. Raid-1 isn't going to affect anything, the disks should have the same data on both. (Though not typically as big a deal with mirrored disks configuration) Although with raid-1, it shouldn't matter that much, other than maybe the order of which certain steps are done. The first thing is, you need to explain whether the raid set is handled in hardware (pre-windows boot) or software (from within windows). Disclaimer: I am not a windows server administrator but had to manage a handful in my past.