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Software mirroring (RAID1) versus "Fake Raid" for new Windows 7 install

- by kquinn

I've just ordered two new hard drives for my main desktop and a copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I'd like to do a clean install of Win7 onto the new drives (leaving my old XP Pro boot partition around for a while in case something goes disastrously wrong, etc.). I want to have them set up in mirrored (RAID-1) mode. My understanding is that Win7 Pro can do software mirroring, but can I set this up directly at install time? If so, how? Note that I'd like the disk to be split into three partitions (OS/Apps&Data/Bulk data), all of which should be mirrored. Would it be better (more reliable or faster) to use my motherboard's hardware RAID support? My motherboard is an older nVidia nForce 680i SLI, which is not the most stable of motherboards, and I'm not sure how trustworthy its RAID1 configuration might be (or if Win7 could even detect and install onto a hardware-mirrored volume). Also, the performance characteristics of RAID1 are rather different than RAID0 or RAID5, and I'm wondering if Win7's software mirroring might actually be faster than hardware RAID1 (for example, I'm more of a Unix admin when I have to wear the sysadmin hat, and I've had great success deploying ZFS; most hardware RAID1 implementations have to read both disks and compare results to look for data errors, but ZFS can read from only one disk in the mirror and just use the built-in checksum, meaning it can have up to 2x the number of reads in-flight, as long as there's no data corruption). Edit: Okay, my question about whether Windows 7 can do software mirroring has been answered, and it can. I'm still unsure whether Windows software RAID or my motherboard's hardware "fake RAID" function is a better choice, though. Remember, I'm only interested in mirroring -- not the more complicated striping or parity operations that generally show the poor performance of crappy motherboard RAID solutions.

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Intermittent Trouble Entering Hibernate on WinXP

- by kquinn

My personal desktop, running 32-bit Windows XP SP2 (with 4GB RAM, 2.75GB addressable, swap disabled, hiberfil.sys existing and contiguous on C:\; SP3 is not installed because SP2 has been working fine and I do not want to re-qualify with SP3 just for sheer perversity) typically gets hibernated at night. For a long time this worked great, but recently the machine has had trouble entering hibernation. Sometimes when I press my power button (configured to hibernate), the box will start the procedure for hibernating (i.e., go to the blue "Windows XP" background logo and display a message about entering hibernation), but before displaying the usual blue-on-black hibernation progress bar it will drop back to the desktop. No error messages appear, on screen or in the system log. The only record of unsuccessful hibernation attempts in the system log, which proudly proclaims that "The Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service entered the running state." once per failed hibernation attempt. The problem is almost certainly resource related: if I then close one or more applications which are running, and repeat the exact same process, the machine will hibernate perfectly. There does not appear to be a reliable high-water mark for virtual or physical memory use, below which the machine is guaranteed to hibernate; it's different every time (though typically, below about 1.1–1.4 GB memory usage seems to be where hibernate succeeds most often). Memory may not even be the relevant resource; as far as I know, it could also be handles or sockets. This behavior is relatively recent: it has only started in the last few months; before then, I could hibernate reliably no matter what the current resource use of the system. This machine claims to have hotfix Q909095 installed, but since the symptoms of my problem match KB909095 rather well, I'm suspicious if this fix is actually working as intended. Any ideas on how to fix this or where to start debugging?