Building a software RAID 1 boot drive on a new Windows 11 PRO Laptop

portman 0 Reputation points
2026-06-16T13:26:36.58+00:00

I have read the answer provided at:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1358201/building-raid-1-on-windows-11-pro-workstations

and understand that the RAID 1 boot drive can be created in Windows 11 Pro, but that answer does not give me a step by step instruction set on how to build the software drive on my new Laptop. The laptop has two 2TB Samsung 990 Pro M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs that I want to install Windows 11 Pro onto after the RAID 1 Array has been created as the System/Boot Drive and a 4TB Samsung 9100 Pro M.2 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD that I will use for my data etc.

Can someone please tell me where such a step by step guide can be found or work with me to create one?

Windows for business | Windows Client for IT Pros | Storage high availability | Other
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  1. Quinnie Quoc 11,830 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2026-06-16T14:07:23.31+00:00

    Dear portman,

    Windows 11 Pro does not provide a native way to build a bootable software RAID 1 array for NVMe drives during OS installation. The “mirrored volume” feature in Disk Management only works for data volumes after Windows is already installed, not for the system partition. To achieve a RAID 1 boot drive, you must configure it at the firmware or hardware level. On laptops with dual NVMe slots, this requires enabling RAID in BIOS/UEFI (often under Intel RST or AMD RAIDXpert2 depending on chipset) before installing Windows. Once RAID is enabled, the two Samsung 990 Pro drives will present as a single mirrored logical disk to the Windows installer, and you can install Windows 11 Pro directly onto it.

    If your laptop firmware does not support RAID for NVMe, there is no supported method to create a bootable software RAID 1 system drive in Windows. In that case, the best practice is to install Windows on one NVMe and use regular backups or third‑party replication tools for redundancy. The 4TB Samsung 9100 Pro can be initialized as a separate GPT disk for data. Microsoft’s official documentation confirms that software RAID is not supported for boot/system volumes, so the only reliable path is hardware/firmware RAID configuration prior to OS deployment.

    If my answer is useful for you, please hit Accept the answer to support me.

    Thank you, QQ.

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