t User guide

Software RAID with Microsoft Disk Management 9
Best Practices
This section describes best practices and Dell recommendations for the disk storage configuration
on your system.
• Dell recommends that you configure your system disks as dynamic disks and create separate
RAID 1 volumes for your operating system and data.
• Dell recommends that you create a 12-GB volume for the Windows Server 2003 operating system.
Operating System Software RAID Configuration Example
For a Dell system with two hard disks, you can configure your operating system and data to be
fault-tolerant by adding a mirror to your operating system volume and creating a RAID 1 data volume.
To convert your disks from basic to dynamic:
1 Launch the Disk Management utility.
2 Right-click on Disk 0 and click Convert to Dynamic Disk.
The system displays a list of all available disks that can be converted to dynamic
and pre-selects
Disk 0.
3 Select Disk 1, so that both Disk 0 and Disk 1 are selected and click OK.
A window labeled
Disks to convert appears.
4 Click Convert → Yes → Yes.
A restart window appears.
5 Click OK.
The system restarts.
6 Log in to the system.
A
System Settings Change window appears.
7 Click Yes.
The system restarts.
NOTE: If a boot volume is selected, two reboots will be required after the disk conversion.
Converting a non-boot volume does not require a system reboot.
NOTICE: After a disk is converted to dynamic, it cannot be converted back to basic unless all volumes
on that disk are removed. Dell recommends that you do not convert a disk back to basic once data
volumes are present as all data would be lost.