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This is a weird question I realize that, but hey.

So, I have an SSD in my server. It's a datacenter SSD, I guess (and hope) it will not have any issue for the next few years - as I barely put any load or writes on it. But you know how it is, it's electronics. They tend to break here and there.

Having to buy and install a new similar sized SSD would be quite costly, so I was thinking. What if I put in a bigger HDD, and put the SSD + HDD in MIRROR mode, in Server 2016 Disk Management? I know that Windows is not playing nicely with RAID per se, like if one drive fails, booting is a chore, but that doesn't matter. I could just use remote KVM, re-install the new SSD, and just dd back the data using Linux and voila' I have everything.

The question: What are the drawbacks of such a setup?
Can Windows somehow delay the sync of the drives, so the SSD remains fast? Or it will become as slow as the HDD? What happens?

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    Please don't do this, it may not work and if it did I think it'll cause more problems than it solves, what you're looking for is more around cached/tiered storage - using the SSD to cache most-used HDD data, Storage Spaces can do this but you'd still want to have 2 x HDDs in R1 for protection. SSD prices are pretty good right now, just buy another.
    – Chopper3
    Apr 26, 2019 at 10:52

3 Answers 3

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SSD + HDD in software Mirror would mean that your SSD would run at the speed of your HDD.

If you're worried about disk failure, backup your system, enable Shadow Copies, install an HDD as a secondary disk for backup and fast restore. Do not software mirror.

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Don't. You will have the performance of the slower drive and the capacity of the smaller drive.

Take backups at the frequency required by your recovery point objective.

If replacing a failed disk and restoring backups cause you too much downtime, reconsider the purchase of an equivalent solid state drive. Then you can mirror it.

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  • Thanks for the answer, you were correct & fastest, but "thelanranger" is a new fella, so I have given him the accept. Still given you an upvote though... Thank you!
    – Apache
    Jun 22, 2019 at 21:04
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It's not RAID, but you could use the SSD as a cache. Server 2016/2019 Datacenter support storage spaces direct, wherein you can use SSD or NVMe as a cache for a HDD.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/understand-the-cache

P.S. ...except you can't do Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) with your single node since TP3 or TP4 of Windows Server 2016.

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    ...except you can't do Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) with your single node since TP3 or TP4 of Windows Server 2016. Jun 2, 2019 at 8:08

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