Implementing Soft RAID

I. Overview

As you know, hardware RAID solutions are fast and stable, and can effectively provide high levels of hard disk availability and redundancy, but remain high. The price is really daunting. Fortunately, Windows 2003 provides embedded software RAID functionality, and soft RAID can implement RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5. Soft RAID is not only very convenient to implement, but also saves a lot of valuable funds. It is indeed a very useful new feature of Windows 2003 Server. A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume where data and parity are intermittently distributed across three or more physical disks.

If a portion of the physical disk fails, we can recreate the data on the failed portion of the disk with the remaining data and parity. A RAID-5 volume is a good solution for data redundancy in a computer environment where most activities consist of reading data. A RAID-5 volume can be created using a hardware-based or software-based solution. With hardware-based RAID, the intelligent disk controller processes the creation and regeneration of redundant information on the disks that make up the RAID-5 volume.

The Windows Server 2003 family of operating systems provides software-based RAID, where the creation and re-generation of information on disks in a RAID-5 volume is handled by "Disk Management", in both cases, the data is All members in the cross-disk array are stored. Of course, the performance and efficiency of soft RAID cannot be compared with hard RAID. Let's start with the creation of dynamic disks, then explain how to implement soft RAID in Windows 2003 Server implementation, and finally talk about the management of soft RAID.

Second, create a dynamic disk

When installing Windows 2003 Server, the hard disk will be automatically initialized to a basic disk. We cannot create new volume sets, stripe sets, or RAID-5 groups in a basic disk partition, but only create a similar disk configuration on a dynamic disk. That is, if you want to create a RAID-0, RAID-1, or RAID-5 volume, you must use a dynamic disk. After the Windows 2003 Server installation is complete, you can use the upgrade wizard to convert them to dynamic disks.

After converting a disk from a basic disk to a dynamic disk, the disk will contain the volume instead of the disk partition. Each of these volumes is a logical part of the hard drive and you can also assign a drive letter or mount point to each volume. However, be aware that you can only create volumes on dynamic disks. Dynamic disk has several advantages over basic disks the following characteristics: