How to check if my hard-drive are on RAID5 or RAID6? - Windows Server

Question

I'm not sure if a server I own has been setup on RAID or not.

Is there any way to check this within Windows, rather than relying on what the company support tells me?

Any ideas? :)

Solution 1

Do you know if you are using software raid or hardware?

Software: look inside Computer Management --> Disk Management. The software version only supports Raid 0, 1, and 5

Hardware: Download and install the management software from the vendor to check. To find the HW vendor look in Device Manager \ SCSI and Raid Controllers

Solution 2

If it's a hosting environment and you're given a VM/VPS, the backend is probably SAN in some form of RAID, and you'd never ever be able to tell that from the OS. If it's private hardware, the answers above are good.

If you're paying someone else to manage your hardware, and you doubt them, why are you paying them? If you want to do some due-diligence, ask for their procedures for handling various types of hardware failure.

Solution 3

If it's hardware RAID, that would depend on the card manufacturer: they might have a utility usable within Windows. If it's software RAID, you should be able to see the status of the disks in the Disk Management plugin to MMC (Right click on my computer and select manage this computer, I believe).

For instance, Adaptec uses ASM. But unless the management company has preinstalled these utilities (unlikely) you'll still be left with taking their word for it.

Comments

[mfinni]

Not sure that helps this guy out too much, unfortunately. If he doesn't even know if it's RAID, he won't know how many drives he's got. If he can check on the things you're asking about, he can get into the RAID config and check himself.

[cwheeler33]

this only works if it's a software raid. A hardware raid will only show up as one disk.