Hi Irena,
While you didn't really give us enough information to answer this question
completely, the most probable answer is no, there is no easy way to do this.
RAID 0 refers to disks that are combined by striping the data across them in
an interleaved fashion. This is mostly done for performance reasons, or
could be to make the combined total of both disks look like one large disk.
The downside of this type is that if either disk fails, you have likely
corrupted all the files on both disks because any particular file's contents
will be split among the RAID members.
RAID 1 on the other hand is a mirror set, where the disks are copies of each
other. This can be for improved read performance, but is more often for
redundancy and robustness, since if one drive fails, the other has an exact
copy, and the OS can "fail over" to the one working disk.
The reason why the details of your setup is important is because there are
different ways to achieve RAID. One is in software, but is not used much
because of performance issues. The other is hardware, typically these days
built-in to the disk controller itself. In fact, many motherboards now
support RAID directly in their onboard chipsets and controllers. The
difficulty with these is that the RAID management is done directly in the
hardware and requires different layout and setup of the RAID tables on the
disk. Since the hardware handles this, you cannot switch from one type to
the other without losing your data. The other problem is that if your RAID 0
set has files totalling more than the size of a single disk, then you can't
fit the files on a RAID 1 set because your total space available is half
that of the RAID 0 set.
This gets even more problematic if the RAID set is also the boot volume.
Probably the only way to convert would be to backup the whole RAID set to
another medium, change the RAID type, re-partition, re-format, and restore
the backup.
The final question is why do you want to do this? Besides ending up with
half as much disk space, there is usually not much need for RAID 1 except on
high availability servers where loss of data or system downtime are
unacceptable.
Russ Poffenberger
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-----Original Message-----
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Irena Thomas
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 12:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Raid 0 to Raid 1
Hi Guys!
We have 2 SATA disks configured as RAID 0. Can we easily change to RAID 1?
If so, how?
Thanks in advance for any pointers.
Irena.
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