The main storage disk, a 1.5TB drive, on my Windows 10 PC has been getting close to full and I have been thinking about exactly what to do before it actually gets over full and starts degrading. I have long thought that upgrading to a three or four terabyte drive in a RAID 1 / mirror would be the way to go. This would provide me with more than twice my current storage and provide a new level of redundancy that I do not now have. (Though I’ve suffered no disk failures.)
Recently, Newegg had a very attractive price on the Toshiba 3TB drive and, having a few extra bucks handy, I pulled the trigger on two of them. While I waited for the drives to arrive, I read though several articles on how to set up the RAID and made some notes on how to install and configure the drives.
By far, the easiest method would be to configure a mirror in Windows. This is a very simple procedure and assigns the two drives a common drive letter and writes to both drives. I did run into a small problem in that I set up my file type as NTFS when Microsoft is now offering BeFS, a more advanced method. Since I had not copied my files yes, I switched to BeFS. In doing this I accidentally started a resynchronization of the drives, which appears to take about seven hours to complete. I managed to stop the resynchronization and recreated the RAID successfully. With this completed, I proceeded to copy my main drive (and another smaller drive) to the RAID. This took about six hours to do and I let most of it happen overnight.
In the morning, the drive copy was complete, but for some reason the monitors had locked up. I was unable to get them cleared and had to restart the machine to correct the problem. Once running again, I noticed that the RAID drive was back in resynchronize mode. I let it run like that for about three hours while I was away, but upon returning it was only 57% done. I searched around the web to find out more about this mirror system and the resynchronization process. It seems that any disturbance to the system; power failure, forced shut down, momentary drive loss, possibly Windows upgrades, will start a resynchronization. These events do happen – probably at least one a week. I can’t live with a seven hour resynchronization every couple of days – heck, I never even leave the machine on for seven hours. I use it for an hour or two and then shut it down or put in sleep mode.
I searched around some more and found that BIOS based RAID configurations are less problematic that Microsoft’s offering and they don’t go through the resynchronization just because there has been a restart without an orderly shutdown… or so I read. I cannot get the BIOS based RAID to work on my machine. As soon as I set the basic RAID settings in the BIOS, the system wigs out and will not boot into Windows. I searched around the web again and found that in most cases, you must create the RAID before you load Windows, which would mean that to get this to work I would have to do a complete system rebuild. Sorry, not going to do that. So, I’ve abandoned the idea of a mirrored drive. (Yes, I know that a separate RAID card would probably be a better solution, but I don’t want to get into all that either.)
Now I’m looking at the idea of using EaseusTodo and placing the second 3TB drive in a removable drive bay that I have. This is essentially how I have been doing my backups for the past few years, though not in a very structured manner. Easeus offers some advanced tools for automatically running the backup based on time interval or system event. The time interval does not work so well for me because I leave the machine shut down when not in use. Running back up on an evet, such as upon startup, might work well. (Running backup on shutdown would be perfect but that feature is not supported in Windows 10.) Once the initial backup is run, additional backups are incremental, so they do not take very long. By using the removable drive bay I have the advantage of being able to store the backup drive somewhere other than with the computer.
My original play was to have the mirror and then use Easeus for additional backup of critical files. Now it looks like I’ll need to back up all the files with Easus and I won’t have fully redundant drive system. How do you solve this problem?