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I'm a long time power user but never had the chance or funds of running RAID in my system.

Last year i finally build a powerful system running an AMD X570 chipset and i use a HGST (now WD) HC530 HDD for storage.

This is an enterprise/server 14TB HDD with helium inside, 512mb cache and 2.5M hours MTBF, 0.35% AFR, and 1 in 10^15 error rate.

You can tell by my selection i have had many experiences with HDDs failing, and even just 3 months ago my motherboard failed and took out the SSD controller on the 970 evo i had installed. In fact i only use HGST disks for sometime now. Maybe I would only touch Seagate EXOS in the future but nothing else.

Now i plan on buying a 2nd HC530 disk to run in mirror mode for extra redundancy. I have 3 options i can use and some specific requirements:

  • Mirroring should not affect data on the existing disk upon creation
  • Disks should be accessible in Linux OS (Ubuntu for example)
  • Any of the 2 disks should be a readable on a different PC if the case arises

The 3 options:

  • Hardware RAID 1 using the X570 onboard RAID controller: This is straight forward, i use the bios RAID setup to create a RAID 1 array and data should be automatically mirrored in both disks. Since both disks are 1:1 identical and no partition changes are made it means it should fill all my requirements above

  • Mirroring array using Windows Disk Management: This seems to be just software RAID 1 so the above should apply here as well, however i believe performance is slightly worst than above.

  • Windows 10 Storage Spaces in mirrored mode: I am totally unfamiliar with this method but i have been recommended it by a few people (maybe for the wrong reasons). I can run it in one-way mirrored mode and it should be similar to above. However i am unsure if it actually makes 1:1 copy of the disk and if it makes any changes to the partition. Also there is the option to use ReFS file system but i'm unsure if it requires re-formatting of the disk (meaning i will lose my data) and if the disk will be accessible in linux. Performance seems to be slightly worse in reading but faster in writing (by some magic somehow)

Hopefully someone can explain me the differences and what should be the ideal option in my case.

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Software RAID is expected to perform a little bit worse than hardware RAID, but it will depend on how well the RAID controller performs.

Hardware RAID will not depend on your OS or file system and is expected to have better performance, specially when installing or replacing a disk and a mirror starts. You will probably lose all your data afaik, though.

With software RAID you might expect worse performance (not in all cases), probably mirroring will take more time to finish. I'm not really sure if you lose your data when you create the mirror group. Also, it might take a few steps more to replace a disk since you will have to configure that new disk in the mirroring group.

Edit: With Windows mirroring, the information of the mirroring group is actually stored in each disk. Trying to use it on a different machine is possible, and you will see that it is detected as a mirrored disk.

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  • thanks but not really an answer to my question
    – TnF
    Jan 28, 2021 at 6:01

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