Raid 1 freeware anywhere?

[relequestual]

Hey all
I went home for Christmas, and planned to raid0 my C drive, however found out my motherboard does not support raid at all!
So, I decided, I could use the new drive I was bought to raid1 my C drive instead, seeing as its the same size.
Does anyone know where I can find some free software for doing this?
I had a quick google, but didnt find very much, plus I trust the recomendations from users of this forum over google any day.

Thanks in advance

Rel

[Shades]

According to this article Windows XP pro comes with a software RAID. Read here about the difference between software RAID and hardware RAID.

One more article about software RAID.

[relequestual]

Yeh I came across those articles before, however they both involve some sort of windows hack, which I'd rather not do.
Hardware RAID isn't really an option for me, and I do understand the difference.
There must be some simple software for doing this, right?

Update: Read alot about this, and it seems it cant be done on the OS disk, which is what im trying to do. Win XP Pro supports it on OTHER disks, just not the OS disk. oh well

[Shades]

Especially with software RAID solutions, you should not include the boot drive into the RAID. With every computer (hardware) glitch there is a possibility that something goes wrong with the RAID (believe that I'm speaking from experience here). In such cases the RAID can be instructed to repair itself, but expect (quite some) downtime that depends on the size of the RAID.

Now imagine that your boot drive is in the RAID. Happy booting from a live-CD like BartPE or WinPE to get it running again. After years of experience I totally agree with the conclusion of the Tom's Hardware article...a software RAID is better than no RAID at all, but go for hardware RAID when there is a possibility to do so.

[f0dder]

Shades: raid mirror is just fine for the system disk, since if one drive fails, you'll just be running with a degraded array (but it still runs). Striping, on the other hand, is dangerous

Snobbery about hardware vs. software raid is plain silly - you need expensive controller cards with battery-backed buffer memory for hardware raid stuff. And you only need that if you do some pretty high-end stuff. The cheaper "hardware" controllers still do pretty much everything via OS drivers.

That said, I'd much rather go for one of the el-cheapo "hardware" controllers than hacking XP system files into enabling raid mirror mode.

[relequestual]

Yeh, i was going to get a cheap raid card, but they were either slow or too expensive!
If i use raid1, i know it will have to write to both disks, but will it then use both disks to read, ie twice as fast?
still looking for some simple software to do it, or is hacking windows the only way apart from hardware?

[f0dder]

There might be some 3rd-party software raid stuff (http://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/index.php isn't exactly raid mirroring (although they call it that), but it's close enough).

Speed isn't going to be an issue with the cheap hardware controllers, as long as you don't plan on running raid-5. You can hit the 133MB/s (shared!) bandwidth of the PCI bus though, if you have lots/fast drives, but for mirroring it should be fine. Intel RAID Matrix (onboard) will do the "read striping" you mention, but I dunno if this is generally being done - definitely something to read up before purchasing!