Creating a Raid Array in Windows 7

One of the biggest worries in today’s tech age is data loss. You never know when it can happen and it’s always best to be prepared. When looking at different solutions, you want to consider performance and fault tolerance. Redundant Array Of Independent Disks(Raid) increases the performance of your hard drive by splitting its data into two different physical drives. Both drives can be accessed simultaneously, theoretically doubling the speed. Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating in the event of failure of some of its components. RAID gives you the best of both worlds by letting you store data on multiple hard disks to either increase your read/write performance or increase your fault tolerance. Creating one is fast and easy. Here’s how:

Step 1- Click the Start Button. Right click Computer > Manage.

Step 2- When computer management opens, click on Disk Management on the left side of the window. Any disk you want included in your RAID you need to delete from the top area of disk management. To do so, right click on the disk you want to delete and click Delete Volume. This will leave the partitions you don’t want in your raid array “active”.

Step 3- Now, you will be able to see how much FREE space is left in the drive. In this case, Disk 1 has 2.00 GB Unallocated.

When choosing a volume type, the two key factors you need to consider are fault tolerance and performance. Here’s a quick breakdown of your volume options:

Mirrored Volume - Has redundancy for fault tolerance but you lose storage space for parity files (used for recovery).

Stripped Volume - Will distribute files across multiple disks to increase performance, but has no redundancy.

Spanned Volume - Combines areas of unallocated space from multiple disks into one logical volume. Spanned volumes require two disks, and you can use up to 32 disks.

Choose a volume that will meet the needs of your RAID. Now that you’ve decided which volume to pick, let’s move on to creating it. In this example, we will choose the Spanned Volume.

Step 4- Right-click on the disk that you want to start the spanned volume, and then click on New Spanned Volume. This will open the New Spanned Volume Wizard then click next.

Step 5- Select which disks you want included in your new volume by selecting the disk, and clicking Add.

Step 6- Assign the new volume a drive letter of your choosing by selecting Assign the following drive letter.

Step 7- Name the Volume Label: {anything that you would like}.

Step 8- Review all the settings that you chose.

Step 9- After, you should be given a warning telling you that you won’t be able to convert the disk to dynamic. Click Yes to continue.

Step 10- After all of that is done, you should be given an AutoPlay prompt. You can Open folder to view files or exit.

Step 11- If you go to your Windows Explorer, you should see your new Volume.

Now that you’ve setup your RAID, you can enjoy the benefits of performance or fault tolerance (or both!). If you want to learn more about RAID and you’re still trying to understand techno jargon, this is a great place to start. Take a look at this here for a more in-depth understanding of definitions and terms