Implementing soft RAID with Windows 2003

I. Overview

As you know, hardware RAID solutions are fast, stable, and can effectively deliver high levels of hard disk availability and redundancy, but high prices are daunting. Fortunately, Windows 2003 provides built-in software RAID capabilities, and soft RAID enables RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5. Soft raid is not only easy to implement, but also a lot of saving valuable money, is indeed a very useful new feature of Windows 2003 server. A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume of data and parity that is distributed over three or more physical disks.

If a part of the physical disk fails, we can recreate the data on the failed portion of the disk with the remaining data and parity. The RAID-5 volume is a good solution for most activities from data redundancy in the computer environment where data is read. You can use hardware-based or software-based solutions to create RAID-5 volumes. With hardware-based RAID, the smart disk controller handles the creation and regeneration of redundant information on the disks that make up the RAID-5 volume.

The Windows Server 2003 family operating system provides software-based RAID, where the creation and regeneration of information on the disks in the RAID-5 volume is handled by Disk Management, where the data is stored across all members of the disk array. Of course, the performance and efficiency of soft raid are not comparable to hard raid. Let's start with the creation of a dynamic disk and then explain how to implement soft raid in Windows 2003 Server, and finally talk about the management of soft raid.

Second, create dynamic disk

When you install Windows 2003 server, the hard disk is automatically initialized to a basic disk. Instead of creating a new volume set, stripe set, or RAID-5 group on a basic partition, you can 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 Windows 2003 Server Setup completes, you can use the Upgrade Wizard to convert them to dynamic disks.

After you convert a disk from a basic disk to a dynamic disk, the disk contains the volume, not the disk partition. Each of these volumes is a logical part of the hard drive, and you can specify a drive letter or hang point for each volume. Note, however, that you can only create volumes on dynamic disks. Dynamic disks have the following characteristics that are superior to basic disks:

Volumes can be extended to include non contiguous spaces, which can be on any available disk.

There are no restrictions on the number of volumes that can be created on each disk.

Windows 2003 stores dynamic disk configuration information on disk, not in the registry or in other locations. At the same time, this information cannot be accurately updated. Windows 2003 replicates these disk configuration information to all other dynamic disks. As a result, the corruption of a single disk will not affect the access to data on other disks.

A hard disk can be either a basic disk or a dynamic disk, but not both, because you cannot combine multiple storage types on the same disk. However, if your computer has more than one hard disk, you can configure each hard disk to be either basic or dynamic.