Hi,

I've got 4 full hard drives that i'd quite like to join together (in raid0-esque style), but i don't want to lose the data on the disks in doing so, which ruled out actual raid. Someone mentioned that I can use windows dynamic disks to emulate this behaviour.

I was wondering if converting these disks to windows dynamic disks would cause any data loss initially, and what the effect of one disk failing would be if they were all joined together (i.e. would they all become pretty useless as they would with raid 0).

Thanks,
Matt

Hello,

I am not certain if you can upgrade basic to dynamic disks, and keep the data intact. My gut feeling says no, and I would not attempt to do such a thing without backups.

You did say you had backups, right?

Converting the disks to a RAID, even in software, will disrupt the information on them. Why? Because of how a RAID behaves, by definition.

The logical partition on RAID 0 systems become useless if one of the disks fails. The disks will be fine hardware wise, but the logical partitions will be corrupted upon failure.

Christian