Windows XP & Mirrors

According to this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q307880

None of the versions of Windows XP support mirrored drives.  Can anyone recommend a good third-party app that will let me mirror my drives? 

Anyone know why Microsoft won't let you mirror your drives on XP?  Seems kinda silly to me...

nathan
Thursday, October 2, 2003

It's not true that XP doesn't support mirrored drives. What is true is that XP does not ship with software mirror support, unlike the server OSes.

If you have a hardware (or semi-hardware, as is more common these days) RAID system, then XP will work just fine with the drivers, presuming the manufacturer provides XP drivers.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Thursday, October 2, 2003

One of the latest Intel P4 motherboards not only supports Serial ATA drives, but the on-motherboard controller supports both RAID-0 and RAID-1.  No problemo (Arnold speak) with XP, dunno about 2K, but I assume Intel has the drivers for that.

Mitch & Murray (from downtown)
Thursday, October 2, 2003

For you RAID newbies, RAID-0 is "stripped" (files spread across multiple spindles) and RAID-1 is "mirrored" - files duplicated across multiple spindles.  0 is fast, 1 is redundant.

Or something like that.

Mitch & Murray (from downtown)
Thursday, October 2, 2003

And bear in mind that all these motherboard-based RAID systems are mixed hardware and software (usually mostly software, in that the drivers do all the heavy lifting).

Performance is good -- better than no hardware assist -- but not at all close to what you get for dropping 4 C notes on an Adaptec SCSI RAID card.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Thursday, October 2, 2003

i'm looking for a software solution - i have two IDE drives, both 80 GB, and i'd like to mirror them.  i can't afford a hardware solution.  RAID 1 is what I want.

why would XP even list the option in Disk Management to mirror a drive, but just have it continually grayed out?

nathan
Friday, October 3, 2003

If you have Win2K server or Win2003 server, you get to mirror them - the option is enabled.  Otherwise, it's grayed out because it's disabled in the workstation versions.

Ankur
Friday, October 3, 2003

As that article indicates, the option is there in the event that you are administering a server-based OS remotely using Windows XP.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, October 3, 2003

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