Can external USB or Firewire drives be RAID configured in Win2k?

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Pierce

Can external USB or Firewire drives be RAID configured in Win2k?


For our home network, I want to implement a RAID 1 (hard disk
mirroring) solution for handeling the storage of ghost images and file
back-ups (family photos, videos, etc.) for my home computers (we have 3
XP pro client machines, and a Windows 2000 Advanced Server). And I want
the back-up system itself to be redundant.


Ideally, I'd like to connect an external Firewire drive enclosure (such
as the ones displayed here: http://www.cooldrives.com/firen.html) which
at a minumm will hold 2 large 250GB IDE drives of my choice in it. I
want to use one of the less expensive enclosures on that web page which
allow each drive to be seen indepenadntly by the OS as opposed to the
more expensive enclousres that have RAID built into them because the
cost of those solutions in addition to the purchase of the hard drives


would put me at about $900 - $1000. I want to spend less than $500 for
the drives and the enclosure.

So here's the question:
If these Firewire connected drives are seen individually by the OS, and
each have their own Windows assigned drive letter, can I make configure
them as dynamic and RAID1 (or even RAID5) if I wanted?


Any experience in this area that you could share would be much
appreciated.


Thank you.
 
Any RAID is supported by server OS only. Dynamic disks are not supported on
portable computers, removable disks, detachable disks that use Universal
Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394 (also called FireWire) interfaces, or on disks
connected to shared SCSI buses. If you right-click such a disk in the
graphical or list view in Disk Management, you will not see the option to
convert the disk to dynamic.
 
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