RAID1 and dual boot / hackintosh?

[teuron]

hi,
im planning to buy a couple of 4tb drives (most likely buy external seagate units and pull them out of the enclosures since for whatever reason they are cheaper than internal ones) and I want to set them up in RAID 1 for backup of data (photos/video footage etc) via onboard mobo controllers from a future build.

ive never done any sort of raid setup before.

some questions:

since i have not yet built the system (havent even bought parts aside from case and PS), but will buy the drives first, can I use them for backing up data BEFORE building the desktop and setting them up for RAID1?
in other words: do I need to format both drives when setting up RAID 1?
or can I keep data on one and have the data copied onto the other drive in the RAID1 setup process?

another question:
I may want to try setting up the build in a dual boot/hackintosh setup (probably pay someone to set it up since I just dont have the time to do all the research in how to make a hackintosh) and I plan on having a dedicated SSD drive for each OS (win7 and osX) but my question is: will both operating systems be able to access and write to the RAID1 array? or do data drives need to be formatted differently for each operating system?
if above is not possible I may skip on the idea of going dual boot/hackintosh but I thought it might be worthwhile to try since ive never had a mac and primary reason for this build will be a DAW and video editing system.

thanx

[dahlfors]

Impossible.

 

Onboard motherboard controllers are not true hardware raid, they are part software raid. This makes it work in windows - but makes the raid unusable in OS X.

 

You're in for some research if you want to find a way to use a pci dedicated hardware raid controller setup that works in both Hackintosh OS X & Windows...

 

Both OS X & Windows support software disk mirroring (raid-1). Neither of the systems would be able to read the other systems raid mirror, though...

 

If you want them both to be able to access a raid-1, I'd recommend getting a NAS or USB3/Firewire storage unit.