In this demonstration, you're going to learn how
to create a software RAID on a Windows machine.
My machine has a few hard drives, and we're going to go ahead
and use the Windows disk management tool
to set up two different RAID systems on it.
Now, one is going to be a RAID 0,
which is going to provide us with more speed and performance
by splitting the data being read and write
into two separate drives on two different disks.
Now, each disk is going to get half of the data.
This means if I lose one of the drives,
I'm going to lose all of the data.
Now, on the other hand, I'm going to create a second RAID.
This is going to be a RAID 1,
which allows us to have two hard disks
operating in a mirror.
So both disks are going to have exactly the same data on.
this means I'm not going to get the performance boost I get
with a RAID 0, but I do get redundancy.
So if one disk fails,
the other disk is still going to be maintaining a fully online
and ready to use copy of all of the data and information.
Now, let's go ahead and jump into the lab
and let me show you how to create these two types of RAIDs.
So on this Windows 10 machine, I currently have a C drive
with the operating system installed,
and I have four blank disks that have been installed.
Let me go ahead and go to my disk management
and inside my disk management, under computer management,
you'll see that I have four disks that are brand new.
I'm going to go ahead and initialize those.
Now, that I've initialized them
I have these four unallocated disks sitting here
at the bottom and my current C drive.
So what I want to do is
I want to create two different RAIDs.
I'm going to create one for video editing,
which means I want performance over redundancy.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click
on my first disk
and go to new striped volume
because I'm going to stripe across Disk 1 and Disk 2
to make my RAID 0 to give me that performance I want.
As I walk through the wizard,
I'm going to add the second disk to it
so I have Disk 1 and Disk 2.
Then I'm going to go down Next,
I'm going to give it a drive letter.
In this case, I'm just going to go ahead
and call it drive D, hit Next.
I'm going to give it a name
and I'm going to call it editing
because I'm going to use it for video editing
and then I'll hit Next.
and then we'll finish,
and we'll say Yes and off it goes.
I now have drive D, which is 1.57 terabytes,
and I have a hundred percent free
because I have two 800 gigabyte drives
working in tandem to give me that one logical drive,
drive D.
But if either of those disk fails, drive D will be gone.
Now, let's go ahead and create a redundant drive,
which is going to be drive three and four.
I'm going to add them together as a mirrored volume.
Now, when I add both of those in, I'm going to get two disks
but I'm only going to get one disk's worth of space
and I'm going to call this R for redundancy.
And so over here for R,
I'm going to call it redundant
and we'll go ahead and format it.
And notice I now have this redundant drive,
which is called drive R,
drive R is a mirror drive.
It is going to be dynamic, and you'll notice that it only
has the capacity size of one of those drives
because one is acting as primary
and one is acting as backup
where both of them have the exact same information.
And if either of them goes offline,
the other drive will still take over,
that gives me my fault tolerance
and that creates a 50% overhead
or a loss of one drive's worth of space.
But that's the sacrifice,
do you want performance and double the space
or do you want redundancy in half the space?
That's the choice that we're making here.
Now, in my case, I chose both.
I wanted One drive as my scratch drive
for all my video editing
and I wanted my redundant drive
to be where I store the finished products
and it gives me that redundancy that I was looking for.