Recovery Volume vs. Raid 1 Volume

[BansiJ]

Right now I am having 2 hard drive as Raid 1 volume but I have heard that I can use a Recovery volume as an alternative to this. Is that true? I have read on Intel website which says that a recovery volume uses RAID 1 technology in order to copy data from master drive to destination recovery drive. I am not sure about what this means. Moreover what is the difference between Recovery Volume and Raid 1 Volume? Please explain about this. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using them?

[Howitzer]

A Recovery Volume and a RAID1 are one and the same in most of the situations. In fact the first one acts as the later one except when you specify a master and recovery disk explicitly. In Recovery Volume, the data between the two drives can be synchronized continuously, or on request. However the Recovery Volume has a limit of 1.3125 TB capacity at the max. Moreover you can access both the drives with your OS. On the contrary, RAID1 volume can be seen as a single drive on the system. And all the files are synchronized continuously and automatically. You can create new volumes in this and there is not such limit as it is in Recovery Volume.

[AMISH]

I am also having some queries related to Recovery volume and Raid volume. Thank you Howitzer for that information but I need some more information about both of the volumes. Can you tell us what are the basic drive requirements for the recovery volume. Does the software performs a verify and repair mechanism if there is a power failure or it shuts down unnecessarily. Is the drive has low access time and slower in write speed? Does that affect the performance of the protected drive?

[BansiJ]

According to the Intel Matrix Storage Manager the partition does not require all of the space on the hard drive but a free space of 4-5 MB is mandatory to run it properly. Why does the Raid volume require so much of space? Can't it work on its own? Is the size fixed to 4-5 MB or it actually consumes more for that? How can I change the RAID 1 volume to a Recovery volume if I want?

[AMISH]

No, the size of 4-5 MB is fixed and that is by design for the Raid partition. You or anyone else can't do anything in this matter. And yes, you can change your Raid 1 volume anytime to recovery volume by running Intel Storage Matrix Console. Once started, you will be able to select the current volume and also be given the option to change its type. Simply follow the wizard and that's it, you are done!