RAID 5 is one of the most outstanding choices a computer user can make for their home-based system. While it is very plain to set RAID 0 and 1, there is complexity involved in RAID 5 setup. RAID 5, as we know, is set up to ensure data redundancy in your system. I will guide you on creating software RAID 5 on Windows 8.1 and 10.
There are several options for a computer user to create RAID for data redundancy. However, RAID 5 has its features and importance, and that’s why we need this RAID 5 so much for our system. Setting up RAID 5 is kind of a complex task for anyone. You can do this in Windows 8.1 and 10 a bit easily.
How to create RAID 5 on Windows 8.1 and 10
We can create RAID 5 and RAID 1 on Windows 8.1 and 10. You would need two drives for RAID 1 and three or more than three hard drives for RAID 5. You depend on the number of drives if you have fewer than three drives. You can’t create RAID 5 on your system and must go for RAID 1. Although, if you want to create RAID 5, you must have three or more three hard drives with you.
To create RAID 5, you need three or more hard drives of the same capacity. These hard drives should exclude the computer’s hard drive or the drive of the OS.
The other conditions for RAID 5 creation would be the drives have to be unformatted. There can be different capacity drives to create the RAID. In such cases, the whole RAID setup will be dominated by the disk with the least capacity. So, it is recommended to avoid using different-sized hard drives.
Check the Formatting of Drives
One of the most important things to remember should be the unformatted drives. To check that and confirm, you have to go for disk management.
Make sure you are logged in as the administrator
Go to Run window – Press Windows + R
Type in ‘diskmgmt.msc’
All the drives that you need must be Unallocated.
If there is a partition in any of them, you can delete the drive, but ensure the data is backed up. After backing up, click on that Drive and “Delete Volume.” Your drive is unallocated now, and it can be used for RAID 5.
Creating Storage
To manage the storage for RAID 5, you have to go to the storage option in the control panel since you have the facility to search the window.
Go to search and type ‘storage space’ – it will display the storage spaces in the system.
You will find a hyperlink saying, ‘Create a new pool and storage space.’
This command will make the system search for the unformatted drives automatically. This is why we deleted the volumes earlier.
After the system detects the unformatted drives, we can change the drive letter and format at our convenience. In the resiliency type, select Parity, it will be followed by storage space declaration.
In size, make the display show the storage space capacity. To know the array capacity, we have to go through some calculations. The smallest disk capacity is multiplied by the number of drives minus one. So, for 3 two TB hard disks, the array capacity would be {2*(3-1)}.
Press the OK button to finish the creation of RAID 5 on your system.
Finally, I would say that creating a RAID 5 for your system is one of the best things to secure the data. It is complex to understand, but its capability to maintain data redundancy is outstanding. In failure cases, the data can be regained quickly with specific troubleshooting steps. If the issues go grave, there are some amazing software to recover RAID arrays on Windows. so the initial step to safeguard your work is to create a RAID 5 in your system.
