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I've bought myself a new server that I'm going to use for some various software developing projects. I have a simple question about Windows 2008 R2 x64 software raid. What if disk 1 fails? Will it automatically swap over to disk 2? And boot up on disk 2 after reboot? Or how do you handle this?

Should I use some tools for monitoring my RAID 1? So if it fails or if there are any errors, I will receive an email. Do you know of a tool capable of this? Or can I do it by having a tool monitoring the event viewer?

Finally, I'm looking for a tool to test the speed (read/write) of my harddrives, before and after introducing RAID 1. What's the best free tool out there?

Tommy Jakobsen
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What if disk 1 fails? Will it automatically swap over to disk 2?

It depends on the computer and how the hard drive failed. If the BIOS on your computer still sees the first drive it will probably attempted to boot to it. Typically with software-based RAIDs you have to reconfigured boot drive after a failure. If you need the computer to be able to survive a disk failure with zero intervention then you really are going to need a good hardware RAID controller.

Should I use some tools for monitoring my RAID 1?

Windows will log RAID events to the Eventlog. There are lots of tools for monitoring the event logs mentioned around the net and on this site.

Finally, I'm looking for a tool to test the speed (read/write) of my harddrives,

I like BST for for quick testing (http://www.nu2.nu/bst/).

Iometer is far more extensive but it does get a bit complicated because of all the available options. (http://www.iometer.org/)

Zoredache
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