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Why do I only see one drive in raid 10

idata
Employee
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Just built a new machine and configured as raid 10. Everything seems to be working fine except that I only see one drive (C:). The Intel Matrix Storage manager sayd the drives are there but I cannot see the mirror drive. How do I check that?

Asus P6X58D Premium MB

Core I7 3.2ghz

(4) WD caviar blue drives

Win7 64

-Steve

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idata
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Because a RAID configuration masses all the drives together into one large array; none of the individual drives can be 'explored' on their own, nor would you want to with a RAID 10 array. RAID 0 stripes the data between two alternate drives to increase write speeds; the stripes can be of varying width but I think the default is usually 64k. So two of your drives are working together as a 'super drive', doubling the capacity and increasing write speeds. RAID 1 then mirrors these two striped drives onto two more spare drives. In this set up, you get the speed of RAID 0 with the redundency protection of RAID 1. In theory. I am learning the hard way that any RAID setup is a fragile beast, and having a redundent array does not protect you from data loss and all valuable data should be backed up anyway.

How can you verify that all 4 drives are being used? Because Intel Storage Matrix reports the raid as 'okay'. The one 'C:\' drive you see should be the size of two of your drives added together; the other two drives are being used to back up your data. But back up valuable information elsewhere anyway.

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