Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock, RAID 1 ... saga continue ...

In my last journey to RAID 1, I was dealing with a failed drive situation with my Z drive, which WAS set up as RAID 1.  So none of my data was lost.  But now I need to figure out how I should move forward, specifically:

• What drive I should use as new Z drive?
• What drive I should use a mirror of new Z drive (assuming that I will continue using RAID 1)?
• Should I continue to use RAID 1?

My assumption was that the previous Z drive and it's mirror was bad since they both showed a symptom which system Scan Disk couldn't completed or still have problem after the fixing.  I have 2 3Tb spare drive, so the logical decision was to use these 2 3Tb harddisk as new Z drive and it's mirror.

And that was when my new sequence of pain started.

I have the 2 drives prepared on another machine as the workflow I documented in my previous blog post, and then I started copying files form old Z backup to this new Z on 3Tb drive (I need to use windows explorer file copy, which is slow, because I want to utilize the whole 3Tb.) Everything went as planned UNTIL I insert the mirror disk.  Suddenly the new mirror disk took over as a MAIN disk, and started REPLACING data from my new Z!  The 1.5 days of file copying instantly turned into nothing.

Luckily, the original old Z mirror is still ok.  So I didn't lost any data; just time.

So I started playing around the combination.  My original diagnostic was that some how the new mirror disk was still recognized as Z drive, while the so called new Z didn't get the drive letter assigned.  So I made a note-to-self that:

• When you prepare drive letter (forr remove it, and removing partition, in order to prepare for the RAID mirror disk) do it on the machine and the drive bay that you intented to use with.  Otherwise you might risk not having the right drive letter assigned and recognized.

HOWEVER, after trying out all sort of combination, I still found mirroring failed to happen. So eventually I have to concluded that on my Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock, 3Tb drive COULDN'T work with RAID 1, which explained everything I experienced so far.

I don't have any spare 2Tb harddisk left.  So for now I will go for the "plan B" approach, which is using SyncToy 2.1 to sync the content from my new Z (still the new 3Tb disk) to backup Z drive.  the advantage is that:

• I can clearly control what files/directories to backup.
• I can mirror the progress (instead of just seeing red light blinking when mirroring happens

But then I have to manually do the backup, instead of the automated "backup" done by RAID 1.

Eventually I know that I will have to buy a few new 2Tb harddisk, and then I will do the RAID 1 I used to do.