Posts by urbanpilot7

Exactly. My main goal for using RAID is hardware redundancy against drive failure, not protection from ransomware or anything else. It’s strictly for storage. I plan to have a dedicated backup drive—likely the one I'm using now—that stays offline most of the time, maybe synced once a month. I don't have the budget for a dedicated NAS right now. I just have two identical new drives and a motherboard that supports a hardware-based RAID 1 via the chipset, independent of Windows.

I assumed that was the case based on your last point. My concern is how the system handles specific scenarios. For instance, when does it notify me if a drive fails? Is it within Windows or during the boot process? What happens when I swap out a dead drive? Can I simply pull one of the disks and plug it into another machine to access it like a standard drive?

The bottom line is that the RAID array needs to function normally even if I switch operating systems or boot from a Linux CD. I need to know exactly what happens during a failure so I don't lose everything by failing to restore the RAID to a healthy state properly.

I actually wrote more about this on another forum (the first post is identical), so I won't repeat myself here:

Greetings. I couldn't find a thread matching my specific scenario, so I'm starting one here. Hopefully, I've landed in the right subforum.

The situation is this: I have an SSD running Windows 7 and an HDD for storage. Since I've lost quite a bit of data due to drive failures—and frankly, I'm too lazy to manage backups, which is impractical—I bought two extra HDDs to set up in RAID 1 for storage. I want redundancy that isn't tied to the OS; if I eventually install Windows 10 or set up a dual boot, I need that RAID array to show up just like any other disk.
I'm using an ASUS Z97 Anniversary motherboard (Intel CPU) with some sort of hybrid RAID controller. The motherboard manual isn't particularly helpful, though it mentions an Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver and software provided on a CD. What I've tried so far is plugging in the drives and switching the SATA mode from AHCI to RAID. This should allow me to access an Intel utility to create a RAID volume via a hotkey (Ctrl-I) during startup. My plan was to create the RAID 1 array, then switch the SATA mode back to AHCI because my SSD won't boot otherwise. In Windows, I see one logical disk (though Windows doesn't see the physical disks individually). However, in the Intel software, nothing appears—neither the logical disk nor the physical drives in the RAID 1 setup. If I plug the drives in normally without RAID, they show up everywhere. Why does Intel Rapid Storage Technology even exist, and do I actually need it? Why isn't it working? Furthermore, if I create a RAID at the BIOS level, how am I supposed to know when a physical disk actually fails?
If anyone has experience with these Z97 boards or this Intel software, I would be grateful. M