Raid help

[zzprop]

Im wanting to rebuild a raid1 I have both drives hooked up but scared to push the rebuild button cuz I dont want to mirror the wrong drive.
When the menu says rebuild how do you know which drive is the one that is going to stay like it is ie.not get written over.
I get kinda confussed about that. I've have nvidia 8300 chip and my asus mobo manual has no detail about the procedure except how to turn on raid in the bios but that is it.
it kinda leaves you on your own.
I'm thinking that rebuild the same meaning as copy to?
it would be nice to have it say "copy to" but that would only be raid 1 case so I guess that wouldn't work.
I guess maybe the drive in sata port 0 would have to be the master and would copy to port 01
hope this makes sense

thanks

 

[Indigo]

The RAID Option ROM should specify which drive it would be mirroring, but in most cases, if you're setting it up from scratch, it will wipe BOTH drives to make the array active. Only the more high end discreet controllers offer the ability to mirror disks without wiping data.

 

[zzprop]

I have a drive that I use for a mirror image of my os and programs but disconnected in case of a software crash so that it won't permiate over to the raid mirror.
In other words what I do occasionally is install the mirrored image drive in the machine as the image drive and do a raid rebuild , then unhook it. I want to have my os ready to go with my latest programs so if this one I'm on now crashes all I have to do is install my mirrored image drive in the machine and i'm up and running. Maybe not 100% but close.
This way i dont have to start from scratch and reload everything which don't get me wrong is a good thing sometime but at least I have a choice if something happens.
I havent done it in a while and when I installed the drive to rebuild I was showing 2 arrays and got confused but after a day of pondering on it I realized the bios thought I had 2 critical arrays because both drives have the raid drivers on them from the previous rebuild dah......
After I figured that out I reallized I had to delete the mbr on the drive I was using as the image to make it a free drive before it would let me rebuild. HELLO ME!!!
Anyway when I did that and rebooted it rebuilt and I'm good to go. (I know no one else does this but me but I'm weird.)
You know when you don't do something for a while you forget how it goes.
I have a regular usb drive to back up files pix music and the likes.


Thanks for your input og.

 

[Indigo]

Be careful with the USB drives. They aren't as robust as folks would have you believe. They're the new 3.5 floppy, and their reliability stinks if you don't treat them like Gold Pressed Latinum. But it's always good to have redundant sources to back up your data. In the future, you might look at building a NAS box out of spare PC parts. The OS itself doesn't require a lot of horsepower, and you can make backups to it.

FreeNAS is a good OS to do this with. I also (heartily) recommend Windows Home Server. I use it, and it's an absolute boon to my archiving process at home.