Is there any way to do software mirroring in XP Pro?

  • Thread starter Thread starter dg
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dg

I recently put together an XP box at work for video surveillance to catch
the thief who has been stealing stuff from one of our vans. The box was
pieced together and I installed 2 old SCSI drives for a data volume. Up
till now I have always used hardware raid but I thought that XP pro could
mirror drives. Apparently it can only stripe them, you need a server OS for
mirroring.

Does anybody know of any 3rd party utilities or anything else that will let
me mirror 2 drives in XP pro?

In this case it turns out the video software has a provision for 2 data
drives and it will copy the data automatically, but I have some other ideas
that would benefit from cheap software mirroring.

THANKS!
--Dan
 
I recently put together an XP box at work for video surveillance
to catch the thief who has been stealing stuff from one of our
vans. The box was pieced together and I installed 2 old SCSI
drives for a data volume. Up till now I have always used hardware
raid but I thought that XP pro could mirror drives. Apparently
it can only stripe them, you need a server OS for mirroring.
Click to expand...

That's just plain wrong. Put 'mirror' in the help.
Does anybody know of any 3rd party utilities or anything
else that will let me mirror 2 drives in XP pro?
Click to expand...

Standard XP can do that.
 
dg said:
I recently put together an XP box at work for video surveillance to catch
the thief who has been stealing stuff from one of our vans. The box was
pieced together and I installed 2 old SCSI drives for a data volume. Up
till now I have always used hardware raid but I thought that XP pro could
mirror drives. Apparently it can only stripe them, you need a server OS
for mirroring.

Does anybody know of any 3rd party utilities or anything else that will
let me mirror 2 drives in XP pro?

In this case it turns out the video software has a provision for 2 data
drives and it will copy the data automatically, but I have some other
ideas that would benefit from cheap software mirroring.
Click to expand...

There's a hack described at
 
Rod Speed said:
That's just plain wrong. Put 'mirror' in the help.
Click to expand...

I respect the fact that you are very knowelgable when it comes to storage,
but I do believe you are incorrect. I always assumed XP would mirror drives
but when I attempted it I could not. The MIRROR option is greyed out. Feel
free to try it yourself, or here is a link that describes the situation:

http://www.petri.co.il/software_mirror_in_windows_xp.htm

In my opinion, this is a marketing move to keep XP from being too robust
(yeah, I think that's a good word to use here).

--Dan
 
I respect the fact that you are very knowelgable when it comes to storage, but
I do believe you are incorrect.
Click to expand...

Did you put mirror in the help ?
I always assumed XP would mirror drives but when I attempted it I could not.
The MIRROR option is greyed out.
Click to expand...

The help explains the situation where that happens.
Feel free to try it yourself, or here is a link that describes the situation:

In my opinion, this is a marketing move to keep XP from being too robust
(yeah, I think that's a good word to use here).
Click to expand...

Mindless conspiracy theory. Have fun explaining the help.
 
Rod Speed said:
Did you put mirror in the help ?
Click to expand...

Yes I did type mirror in help, and the result says:

"You can mirror volumes only on computers running Windows 2000 Server,
Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server."

Nothing in the help indicates that XP can mirror drives. What am I missing?
Have you successfully mirrored drives on an XP machine using the XP disk
management features?

Thanks,
--Dan
 
I don't know about XP mirroring, but I followed a few people's advice
in here and got Acronis True Image. It's fantastic. You can create a
virtual drive of your mirror image and pull from it any file(s) saved
in the image.

It's well worth the $49.

I use XP Pro.
Click to expand...

That's an image, not a mirrored drive. He's talking about RAID-1.
 
Yes I did type mirror in help, and the result says:

"You can mirror volumes only on computers running Windows 2000 Server,
Windows 2000 Advanced Server, or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server."

Nothing in the help indicates that XP can mirror drives. What am I missing?
Have you successfully mirrored drives on an XP machine using the XP disk
management features?

Thanks,
--Dan
Click to expand...

I don't know about XP mirroring, but I followed a few people's advice
in here and got Acronis True Image. It's fantastic. You can create a
virtual drive of your mirror image and pull from it any file(s) saved
in the image.

It's well worth the $49.

I use XP Pro.
 
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