Can a mirror be set up with an Optane accelerated HDD

[BWhit8]

As the title inquires, I am wanting to set up a back up of the drive by mirroring it with another drive. I am not looking to set up a "Raid 1" array because I know that is not supported. I am looking to set up an actual mirror drive as set up under Windows 10 Disk Management > Right click drive and "Mirror...". Is this something that you can confirm or deny the possibility of? I have looked everywhere and not seen the question asked. Thank you.

P.s. I am not trying to boost the mirror drive with Optane either.

[idata · Accepted solution]

Hi DarkerSavant,

Thank you for posting in the Intel® communities.If I understood you well, you currently have a drive that is being accelerated with the Intel® Optane™ Memory, and you would like to mirror this drive into another for backup purposes, correct?If so, I have to tell you that this configuration has not been tested nor validated, therefore I cannot tell you that it'll work. The Intel® Optane™ Memory, when it's paired with a drive, it stores system files to make the acceleration possible. That's why the drive or the module won't work if you remove one of them from the system without deconcatenating them first from the application.Following this line, when you mirror the concatenated drive, it may be mirrored with not all the system files, so the mirrored drive may be useless; or maybe it will be useful but it will require the Intel® Optane™ Memory to work. Anyhow, I cannot tell you what happens exactly as this scenario is not tested and therefore not supported.My recommendation for you is to disable the Intel® Optane™ Memory first from the application. Then, once the drive has been deconcatenated, you can mirror it and backup the information. Finally, you can re-enable the module again and continue working as usual. I recommend you this way because the Intel® Optane™ Memory may fail as any other drive, so it should be preferable to have a backup of the data without the Intel® Optane™ Memory, so you won't have issues or unexpected results when accessing the data from the backup drive.I hope I have answered your concern. If I misunderstood what you want to do, please let me know.Have a nice day.Regards,Diego V.

[BWhit8]

Thank you for the response. Is this something perhaps you can bring to your engineers to see if it's able to be supported? I am glad Intel managed to support a secondary drive otherwise I never would have gotten it in the first place, but a huge turn off myself and what I have also read others have said is that the inability to Mirror with Raid array as a backup is worrisome. A standard mirror would alleviate this lack of back up with a Raid 1 array.

[idata]

Hi DarkerSavant,

Sure, I'll forward your feedback about this so that the proper team can check it and consider it for future releases, although I cannot guarantee you that this will be indeed supported in future releases.Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with, or if your doubts have been answered.Regards,Diego V.

[BWhit8]

I'll update this post with my results if I get around to mirror attempts. I don't have an extra drive at the moment to try but will sometime soon.