Software raid 1?

[RyanW2050]

I am coming to the realization that if my media HDD went i'd lose a lot of shit that i'd rather not. Can I buy 2 identical HDDs and put them in RAID 1 without a hardware controller?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Blain]

You need some sort of onboard or add-in RAID card for running RAID 1.
You could use a second HD and have it for incremental back-ups of your data, without resorting to a RAID configuration.

 

[Madwand1]

An external offline backup is logically better than RAID 1, as long as you actually backup frequently.

Vista Business might support software RAID 1, but there could be issues if you're dual-booting. RAID 1 is the simplest RAID though, so getting a cheap add-on PCIe controller shouldn't be hard, and many motherboard chipsets also implement RAID 1.

Installing those drivers under a working OS is sometimes tricky, and for those sorts of changes, an eternal backup is good idea.