By AOMEI / Last Updated February 25, 2020

Replace Mirrored Drive (RAID 1) on Dynamic Disk with A Large One?

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. The following Windows operating systems allow you to realize mirrored drive configuration:

  • 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

After creating mirrored drive in the system above, you may find the capacity can not meet your growing data storage requirements. In such case, the easiest way to solve this problem is to replace mirrored drive.

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 2003 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.

  1. Remove mirror from mirrored drive (Disk 2). Right click mirrored drive and select "Remove Mirror" in the drop-down menu. In the pop-up dialog box, select Disk 2 and click "Remove Mirror".

  2. Add mirror to the larger drive (Disk 3). After the step 1, mirrored drive becomes simple volume. Right click the simple volume and select "Add Mirror" in the drop-down menu. In the pop-up dialog box, select Disk 3 and click "Add Mirror".

  3. Repeat the step 1 to remove mirror from another mirrored drive (Disk 1).

  4. Repeat the step 2 to add mirror to another larger drive (Disk 4).

  5. Since Windows Disk Management can not extend dynamic mirrored drive to unallocated space. However, there is a trustable partition manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It is equipped with Dynamic Disk Manager tool, which allows you directly resize the dynamic mirrored drive as you wish.

Method 2: Replace mirrored drive with AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager

As full-featured dynamic disk and partition management solution, AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager allows you to create/delete/formatdynamic volume, resize dynamic disk, shrink dynamic volume, move volume slice, extend dynamic system volume, move volume slice, add drive to RAID, remove drive from RAID and convert dynamic disk to basic disk for Windows 7/8/Vista/XP/2000 and Windows Server 2000/2003/2008/2011/2012 (both 32 bit and 64 bit).

Step1: Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and click Dynamic Disk to launch its Dynamic Disk Manager wizard. Then select "Move Volume Slice" in the left Wizard pane.


Step2: In the pop-up window, click "Next" to skip the first page and select dynamic volume (E: Mirrored Drive). Then, click "Next" to continue.


Step3: Tick "I need to move volume slice from…" and select mirrored volume on Disk 2. Then, click "Next" to continue.


Step4: Select the larger drive to replace. Then, click "Finish" to return to main window.


Step5: Repeat the steps above and replace mirrored volume on Disk 3 with larger drive on Disk 5.


Step6: Right-click mirrored drive and select "Resize/Move Volume".


In the pop-up window, drag the right slider rightwards to extend mirrored drive into unallocated space. Then, click "Ok" to return to main window.


Step7: Last but not the least, all the changes are listed "Pending Operations". To apply and save the changes, you need to click "Commit" on the toolbar.

Compared with Method 1, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is more easy, time-saving and safe to replace mirrored drive with a larger one.

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