On Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:27:18 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
If that's what you're after, why not just use FlexRaid or SnapRaid? They
do the same thing.

Now that you have mentioned them, I need to look into FlexRaid and
SnapRaid. The appeal there would be the possibility that I could
implement one of them without rebuilding the existing Windows
7/purchasing Windows 8.

Right, at least for SnapRaid. I'm less familiar with the underpinnings
of FlexRaid but I think it's true there, as well.

Assuming both will run under Windows-7, do you prefer one over the
other?

I'm not using either of them, but I'm most interested in SnapRaid
because its limited feature set doesn't overlap with DB. You can specify
one or more drives to be your parity drives, with the only big
requirement being that parity drives have to be as big as your biggest
data drive, and you can decide how many drive failures you want to guard
against by designating that number of parity drives.

The two strikes against SnapRaid that I have a

1) I wouldn't want to run it against the DB volume directly, but rather
against the individual drives that make up the DB volume. I assume that
means that the individual drives need to have a drive letter assigned,
which I don't normally do. This would apply equally to FlexRaid.

2) SnapRaid uses the snapshot model, so every night or so you'd run it
and have it update the parity drives. If you lose one or more drives, up
to the number of parity drives, you can recover to the state of the last
snapshot.

By contrast, I believe FlexRaid has a real-time capability, so that the
parity drives are kept updated at all times. FlexRaid isn't free,
though, and when I was more serious about it (2010 timeframe?) the
author was prone to disappearing for months at a time.

Both packages had good reviews, so it's mostly laziness that has kept me
from taking the next step and picking one. It's 5-6 years later now, and
I wonder if both are still being developed and supported.