Create RAID Array on Azure Windows VM

This article will show you how to create RAID 0 (for best performance), or RAID 1 (for fault tolerance) Array on an Azure Windows VM. And will take HB120v3 as example to stripe its 2 local 960GiB NVMe disks.

1. Open a command prompt and type “diskpart".

2. At the “DISKPART" prompt, type “list disk" to list all available disks in this VM. In this example we see 2 960GiB disks on Disk 0 and Disk 1.

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          960 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online          960 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online            8 GB      0 B
  Disk 3    Online            8 GB      0 B
  Disk 4    Online            8 GB      0 B
  Disk 5    Online          419 GB      0 B

Now repeat below steps 2.1 and 2.2 for every disk you would like to stripe together. That is 0 and 1 in this example.

2.1 Select the disk.

DISKPART> select disk 0

2.2 Convert the selected disk to dynamic.

DISKPART> convert dynamic

3. Create volume array on disk 0 and 1.

DISKPART> create volume stripe disk=0,1

DiskPart successfully created the volume.

4. Check the volume # with Type = “Stripe". Let’s say “5″ as example.

DISKPART> list volume

5. Select the volume and format it.

DISKPART> list volume 5
DISKPART> format quick recommended label="nvme"

6. Assign an available driver letter. Let’s say “d" as example.

DISKPART> assign letter d

Your new volume is ready to use now!

For Linux VM: Create RAID Array on Azure Linux VM – Raymond’s Tech Thoughts