Server 2019 on Dynamic Disk installation

[Amironox]

Hello all. Unfortunately there are no information found for exactly my case of installing OS on Dynamic disk(mirror). Maybe someone have an experience.

The idea is to install OS a server with mirror of two NVMe m.2 drives. There are only a couple of PCIe m.2 RAID controllers on a market and the cost is above 500USD. That's why Dynamic disk option was selected. And accordingly to MS, it's supported to install an OS on a dymanic mirror. And indeed os is going through installation fine. But don't boot after the installation done. Any ideas on what night be wrong?

 

[JSchuricht]

Don't go down that road. Either use a built in raid through the AMD or Intel chipset or use a single disk.

 

[Amironox]

Unfortunately there is no M.2 RAID available on the server motherboard. So dynamic disks is the only option. Why you think it's not reliable?

 

[Dev_Mgr]

Dynamic disk doesn't support automatic failover if the primary drive ("SATA-0") fails. You'd have to go into the BIOS and tell it to boot from the other drive.

In my storage support days, dynamic disk only came up in combination with major problems. It works fine... till it doesn't. Then you have major problems that aren't easy to resolve and take a lot of time and manual intervention to resolve.

I'd suggest to look into something like Dell's BOSS-S1 or a generic equivalent, as that's a better approach (and it supports Windows, ESXi, and I suspect even Linux).

Note that the BOSS-S1 does hold 2 M.2 2280 SSDs, but they have to be AHCI/SATA and not NVMe, but Dell has newer versions (S2 I think) and for the 'generics' you'd want to read the specs. This BOSS-S1 can be found on Ebay for under US$100 (I have no affiliation with this seller, but this is an example).

SATA won't have the IOPS of NVMe, but a SATA SSD is still a huge improvement over spinning disks, and for a bootdrive (even Windows), the difference between a 50k IOPS boot drive and a 250k IOPS bootdrive won't be noticeable.

 

[CyklonDX]

as mentioned above dynamic disks don't do auto failover; what you need to do is go from installation disk, use it as 'repair', and go into command line; from there use fdisk to activate the remaining mirror disk. It won't boot if its just present as windows automatically sets it as disabled disk if all disks are not present. *you may need to convert to logical.