Vaio Z (2012) - is it possible to switch from RAID 0 to RAID 1 ?

Good people of NBR,

I am looking for a way to reconfigure the drives (2 x 128 GB) of my Vaio SVZ1311C5E from RAID 0 to RAID 1.

As far as I know, the existing RAID 0 configuration of the Vaio Z leads to better performance and makes full use of the 256 GB of space available. The disadvantage of this configuration is: If only one of the two SSD's fails, it would make the notebook unusable.

As security of my data is more important to me than sheer speed - I really don't care if my drives read at 800MB/sec or 400B/sec and use less than 50% of the space anyway - I would like to reconfigure the laptop and use a RAID 1 setup instead.

The result should be that the level of safety is much higher, because all data would be written identically to two drives, thereby producing a "mirrored set".

Did anyone of you have the same thoughts and found a way to do this?

Thanks,

Jacob

 

Apart from the rather cumbersome process to make the switch, be aware that any recovery partition will be lost and you need to backup/restore it if you need it. Also the Rapid Wake partition will be lost and I don't know if Rapid wake can be enabled again once gone.

But the important message I want to convey is: Raid is NOT backup!

What are the odds that whatever fails, is just one of the drives that are part of the raid volume? If the controller fails, you're screwed anyway. If some other important part of the Z fails, you might be just as screwed.

I suggest using some synchronizing backup solution to external storage, such as Acronis Nonstop backup or similar. That's a much safer solution for safeguarding your data than any mirroring raid setup could offer.

 

"RAID is not a backup" is true but people call it is data redundancy except RAID-0.
RAID > 0 is the first step to protect your data from being lost due to hardware failure.

You are not screwed due to other parts failure because your RAID Volume is still intact and you can plug it to any other same RAID controller to get your data out.
External backup is for the worst scenario that your data is totally lost.

 

Thanks for your answers. Unfortunately I do only understand half of it, even after reading the wikipedia articles about RAID 1 several times.

What I would like to achieve is the following: If disk A is the disk I am using, then disk B shall at all times contain a mirror of disk A.

In the event that one of the disks fails, I can buy a new disk and make a 1:1 copy of the disk that remaines functional. The RAID discussion aside...is there a way I can do this?

Thanks,

Jacob

 

RAID-0 or Stripe is that your data is spanning across physical drives you have in the array, so it boosts performance. However, it does NOT protect your data.
Any drive in array fails, you will lost all data in the array.
Array size will be the total of all member physical drives.

RAID-1 or Mirror is that your data is copied to both drives in array or mirrored. RAID-1 does NOT boost performance, but YES protect your data in case one drive fails (but not both ). If you have one drive failed, just plug a new drive in and the system will automatically repair the array (sync current to new drive).
However, Array size is a half of total member drives in array.

 

Thank you. This is the information I was looking for. Does anyone know if I can use the recovery DVD to reinstall the OS to my notebook after switching to Raid 1? Or will the recovery process switch back to RAID 0 before formatting the drives?

 

Yes, once you create raid, recovery will work as normal.

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