Ish, and it depends on version -- like I created a RAID1 array for my gaming box when I was using windows 7 pro; then upgraded to windows 10 home thinking "I'm not using any of the pro features anyway"... turns out that RAID1 is a pro feature.

What's worse: if you try and mount the drives, it doesn't say "this looks like a raid1 volume, I don't have drivers for that, please upgrade to access this data", it says something more like "data corrupt, would you like to format this drive? [Yn]" :/

So RAID1 will someday be DLC in the Windows Store?

I think on older client versions of Windows like Windows XP it was restricted to RAID 0.

Yes Windows has had RAID for a long time. There has been various limitations. I don't think you can boot a RAID 0 volume, for instance. It's certainly not as flexible as Linux's model, but Windows usually isn't.

As far as hardware RAID controllers, at least you get a battery-backed write cache that will "just work" without the OS, right? As in, you don't need to boot the OS to finish flushing. Or maybe I've just bought into the hardware RAID marketing. It does seem simpler, as in less to deal with, to let the card do it and just present whatever volumes desired to the OS.

My time playing with hardware RAID cards is over. My disks spent their time dropping on different builds (even with TLER disks only). For a home NAS, a synology style linux software RAID with regular data scrubbing is the peace of mind solution. For the cache problem, a cheap UPS that lasts the few minutes required to gracefully shut down is a good enough solution. As for performance, my bottleneck is the 1 gigabit port on my laptop anyway. And I don't see any improvement on the horizon for that anyway.

I believe you mean a cheap UPS. A cheap PSU is likely to last a very small fraction of a second in an outage.

Corrected. Thanks!

As I recall, They have supported raid 0 and/or 1 since some editions of windows XP.

Same thing on Windows 7 (that may be limited to the pro/entreprise editions)

Since windows server 2012. The OS has "storage spaces" which is a full management solution for RAID and volumes and physical disks. It's somewhat similar to the ZFS/zpool/mdraid/dmcrypt tooling, EXCEPT it's all in a single software, unified, way easier to use and with a nice GUI.

IMO. Software raid and disk management is utter shit on Linux. They are easily lagging > 10 years behind but that's just my point of view.

Actually the underlying interfaces are for the largest part sane; and what's more are much easier configure from the command line (and use git or whatever source control, or devops tools). The only area where the Linux side is not easier is for first time or very occasional users who want an easy GUI with native bling to configure things with.

I disagree on the sane part.

Make a simple search on google on "how to resize a partition on linux" and you get ten tutorials, all of which give different steps, none of which work.

There are at least 7 different tools for managing disks on linux most of which vary by distribution and version: fdisk, mkfs, partx, parted, growpart, mdraid, dmcrypt...

Little story: The auto extending of partitions on boot (i.e. a critical thing in cloud environment) has been broken in debian stable for more than 6 months.

It's calling "growpart" that is calling other tools, one of which is "partx". Some flags are changing between versions and it breaks the whole toolchain, unless all software versions are carefully selected.

We could continue on why do some of the tools only accept cylinder and block counts as size??? or why is gparted a terrible GUI for managing disks.

There isn't much, if anything, you can't configure from PowerShell these days. Microsoft even has versions of Windows Server without a GUI at all.