is it possible to raid without format???

[PAoReVoLT]

hi, i have 4 1tb drives (ES.2) (2 old ones + 2 new ones currently purchased) with asus striker II (780i) i would like to do raid 5 but dont want to format because there are so many data in 2 drives

thank you in advance

*window vista 64bit

 

[houkouonchi]

Sorry but the drive has to be initialized. Raid5 uses parity which means that each drive has a percentage of it which is just allocated to parity data. If you have 4 drives this would be 25% if you have 10 this would be 10%. There is no getting around having to lose all the data on the drives you create a raid5 array with. You would have to copy them somewhere else temporarely and move them back after you created the array.

 

[PAoReVoLT]

there are 1.5tb of files i dunno where to put is there a way to do it like drive by drive or something? how about raid0 is there a way to combine drive without formatting it?

thank you

 

[Billb2]

Sounds to me like you've read about the benefits of RAID, but not about how it actually works.
There are soooo many descriptions on the internets that I'm not going to link to a particular one.

 

[MerlinRML]

Originally posted by: PAoReVoLT
there are 1.5tb of files i dunno where to put is there a way to do it like drive by drive or something? how about raid0 is there a way to combine drive without formatting it?

If this is data you are concerned about losing, you should have a backup before doing anything that messes with the drive.

Also, RAID by itself is not a backup.