Martin A. Brooks » vista http://blog.hinterlands.org The random thoughts of a random techie. Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:12:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Some Vista and hardware hatesta http://blog.hinterlands.org/2009/02/some-vista-and-hardware-hate/ http://blog.hinterlands.org/2009/02/some-vista-and-hardware-hate/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:56:00 +0000 admin http://blog.hinterlands.org/?p=15 As I mostly use my home PC for playing games, I tend to try and keep it
reasonably up to date in terms of both hardware and software. Earlier this
year my graphics card’s memory went a bit funny meaning I had to buy a new one,
then my gaming mouse started having tracking problems, so I replaced that and,
last week, the primary hard disk on my system decided to lunch itself. At the
time I was unable to determine if this was hardware or just the filesystem
getting spaghettified. Given the number of times Vista had crashed due to the
graphics card problem I would not have been surprised either way.

I decided to buy a new disk in the form of a 300G Western Digital VelociRaptor,
which merited a Vista reinstall. This then freed up two 500G disks for me to
test and perhaps reuse. I decided to RAID1 the two disks so I could have a
little bit of protection against disk failure. Obviously all my important data
is backed up properly anyway.

Windows Vista Ultimate 64 edition, Microsoft’s flagship desktop OS has no
support for software RAID1.

I’ll say that again, just in case you skipped over the sentence: Windows Vista
Ultimate 64 edition, Microsoft’s flagship desktop OS has no support for
software RAID1.

I can RAID0 the two disks, I can create a spanned volume across the two disks,
but no RAID1. After a couple of hours of Googling in sheer disbelief, it turns
out to be true. Instead I’ve had to, for now, hook up my two disks to the
motherboard’s RAID BIOS thingy.

I paid nearly £200 for an OS that won’t do RAID1.

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