Dynamic disk configurations?

[Kurjack]

I'm currently setting up a new pc build with Windows Home Server 2011. To stay within my budget constraints I opted for a mother board with no RAID capabilities. Now I have two 2TB drives installed within the system(primary usage of server is for backups). Now is it better to make the disks dynamic using windows to mirror the drives or to simply leave the drives as is and run a script every week to copy content from one disk to another?.

This guys kinda cool

[grinder]

despite being a OS level software RAID, you should get a boost in read performance if you choose to setup the disks as RAID 1

[JD]

Originally Posted by grinder

despite being a OS level software RAID, you should get a boost in read performance if you choose to setup the disks as RAID 1

Unfortunately dynamic disks don't really give you any performance benefit, at least in my experience.

[Kurjack]

Ah, im not looking for performance, im simply looking for the best solution to have RAID 1 disk(dynamic mirror).
I currently have the disks in a dynamic setup(took a really long time to sync.), was just seeing if anyones had problems with them before when a disk fails.

[JD]

Dynamic disks definitely aren't the easiest to work with, but I would assume WHS is a little more user friendly than Server 2008 itself.

Rebuilding is always going to take hours/days depending on the size of the array.

[Kurjack]

Yeah I got the dynamic disks all wired up and working, I think I might try unplugging one tonight and seeing what happens to the OS. Since fully mirroring all partitions on the drives I can see when loading the BIOs 2 windows boot partitions which load the same os.

[BlueByte]

If you using the dynamic disk function unplug the master and reboot the server. Its been a bit since I have gone down the dynamic road but I seem to remember a F8 like screen on boot up that says A) master failed B) to switch over to the mirrored drive or not. Anyone confirm this, this has been a few years since I have used dynamic...

[grinder]

dynamic works quite seemlessly. I don't remember the F8 style screen when I booted a windows server with a degraded dynamic array. It does warn you in the system tray tho and in an popup. The biggest issue i've had is that the server is almost paralyzed while building/re-syncing the array if it has a slow/budget CPU.