AOMEI Partition Assistant
How to Replace Mirrored Drive with A Large One?
When you need to replace Mirrored drive with a larger one, you can try the Disk Management and a third-party dynamic disk manager. No matter which tool you like, here you can find detailed guides on how to replace mirrored volume with a larger one.
By Emily / Updated on May 12, 2023
What is Mirrored drive on dynamic disk?
Software-based mirrored drives are mirrored volumes on the dynamic disks. A mirrored volume, also known as a RAID-1 volume, is a fault-tolerant volume that duplicates data on two different physical disks and provides data redundancy by using two identical copies (mirrors) of the volume.
It is impossible to set up mirrored drive on computers that are running Windows Vista, XP, and Windows 2000 Professional. You can realize mirrored drive configuration in the following operating systems:
◐Windows 7/8 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate;
◐Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server;
◐Windows Server 2003 (all editions, 32/64-bit);
◐Windows Server 2008 (all editions, 32/64-bit);
◐Windows Server 2011, 2012;
Why need to replace Mirrored Drive (RAID 1) with larger one?
“We have a three year old HP server with two 33GB Seagate mirrored drives. One of the drives has failed, and I am unable to locate another Seagate drive to replace it. I ended up buying two larger, but cable compatible Seagate drives, with the intention of replacing both the existing drives. Thanks in advance for your help.”
When the mirrored drive is about to fail, you may need to replace it with another one. Or when the capacity can not meet your growing data storage requirements, the easiest way to solve this problem is to replace mirrored drive with a larger one.
How to replace dynamic mirrored drive with a larger one?
To replace dynamic mirrored drive with a larger one, you need to add two larger disks into your system and convert them to dynamic disks. The following section will take Windows Server 2012 for example and provide two methods to replace dynamic mirrored drive with a larger one, please select whichever is more convenient.
▌Method 1. Replace mirrored drive with Disk Management snap-in
First of all, you can use the Windows native Disk Management to replace mirrored drive. Steps are:
1. Remove mirror from mirrored drive (Disk 1). Right-click mirrored drive and select "Remove Mirror" in the drop-down menu.
2. In the pop-up dialog box, select Disk 1 and click "Remove Mirror".
3. Add mirror to the larger drive (Disk 3). Right click the mirrored drive on disk 2 and select "Add Mirror" in the drop-down menu.
4. In the pop-up dialog box, select Disk 3 and click "Add Mirror".
Finally, you can find the new mirror volume on a larger disk.
Repeat those steps to remove mirror volume from another drive (Disk 2) and add mirror to another larger drive (Disk 4).
▌Method 2. Replace mirrored drive with AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager
The first method requires that you remove one of the mirrored volume and add a new. Not so convenient! To make it as easy as possible, you can use the trustable partition manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Server. It can directly move mirrored volume slice from one dynamic disk to another to finish this replacement. It is compatible with Windows 7/8//10/Vista/XP/2000 and Windows Server 2000/2003/2008/2011/2012 (both 32 bit and 64 bit)/2016/2019.
Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and click “Dynamic Disk Manager” in the right menu.
Step 2. Then select "Move Volume Slice" in the left Wizard pane.
Step 3. In the pop-up window, click "Next" to skip the first page and select dynamic volume (E: Mirrored Drive). Then, click "Next" to continue.
Step 4.Tick "I need to move volume slice from…" and select mirrored volume on Disk 2. Then, click "Next" to continue.
Step 5. Select the larger drive to replace. Then, click "Finish" to return to main window.
Repeat the steps above and replace mirrored volume on Disk 3 with larger drive on Disk 5.
Summary
There are two methods for you to choose to replace mirrored drive with a larger one. Compared with method 1, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server offers an easier way. Besides, it is also able to extend mirrored drive with unallocated space, convert dynamic disk to basic without deleting volumes, clone hard drive, migrate OS to SSD, etc. If you want to install this amazing software on unlimited computers, you can try its Unlimited Edition.
