hard drive raid question from newbie

[cuti7399]

Hi,
I have 1 seagate 160g sata and 1 hitachi 160g sata drive. Can I raid these together or do I need to have two of the same brand? The motherboard is dfi nf4 ultra-d. Thanks for any help

 

[themusgrat]

Yes, you can.

 

[cuti7399]

how do i setup and what are the requirements for raid 5? i heard it's the most secure and fast setup

 

[RebateMonger]

You'll need at least three hard drives for RAID 5. RAID 5 is slow unless you have a hardware-based RAID card, which typically costs $150 or more.

 

[Porter21]

Raided raptors

 

[alzan]

If your mobo supports it, you could use just your current two drives in a RAID 1 setup; you'll have a mirrored copy of your drive in case it goes down, and you won't have to spend extra money on third hard drive and RAID controller.
Also, three hard drives in your case = HEAT; get some extra cooling (and blow air over the drives) if you go the RAID 5 route.

alzan

 

[cuti7399]

okay, i got 2x80gb drives in stripe raid and installed windows fine. Can I now install another 160g drive to mirror the raid i already have? I don't want to loose data again. Help, thanks

 

[elT]

As far as I know, creating RAID volume will erase all the data on your HDDs, so doing any changes now will delete it.

 

[RebateMonger]

What you are describing is RAID 10 or RAID 0+1. Both require FOUR drives to implement.

I'd put that 160GB drive in an external USB housing and use it to make periodic backups of your RAID 0 array. Even if you DO create a RAID 10 array with four drives, you STILL need a fifth drive to make periodic backups.

Example of RAID 0+1 Array

Example of RAID 10 Array

Unless you understand EXACTLY how these four-drive arrays are managed, the odds are pretty good that YOU will wipe out the array yourself doing maintenance or repair.

 

[cuti7399]

ok, i have 2x80g drive in raid 0 and everything is running fine now. thanks for all of the help. couple question i have now:

1. if one of the drive fail, can i just get a replacement of the same SIZE and restore the image?
2. can i just copy the whole raid setup to one single 160g drive and use it?

THANKS

 

[spike spiegal]

Just for the record, not all RAID cards allow you to mix and match drives. My 3Ware RAID cards, which are legitimate hardware RAID cards and not the software based junk mostly discussed here, will *not* allow drives of different types, even if they are the same size.

1. If you lose one drive with RAID 0, everything on both drives is gone. This is why I don't advocate ussing RAID 0 except for non volatile data you can afford to lose.

2. Windows sees the two 80gig drives as a single 160gig drive, at least from a data point of view. You can copy data to and from the RAID drive to a single 160gig drive, which I highly advise doing for back-up reasons.

 

[cuti7399]

so it's ok for me to clone the 2x80g to 1x160g and use it as the boot drive