Promise TX2000 RAID1 + Single Drive

[Noriaki]

Hi all,

I've never done the RAID thing before, but a friend of mine is offering to toss me his Promise TX2000 really cheap, and I can pick up another 40GB drive for pretty cheap, thought it might make a nice little RAID1 to store my important stuff on...you know like my thesis and my photo album (since I've pretty well abanonded the concept of hard copy photos, despite not having a digicam of my own )

I'm not terribly concerned about performance here, my Maxtor 80GB (7200RPM, 8MB) is plenty fine as my main drive, what I'm wondering is can I have this sort of configuration on the RAID controller...

- 80GB drive as a single non-arrayed drive (it's partitioned, as in using Windows MMC disk manager, but that shouldn't matter should it?), this is the boot drive.

- the two 40s will be in a RAID1

- and just for giggles since I'll have 8 IDE ports now, toss in my old 30GB as another single drive.

I see from the manual you can definately have two arrays, but the only things I see about single drives are "free spares" that are inaccessable to the OS.

So could I have 3 "arrays" where 2 of said arrays are actually individual drives?

Thanks all.

PS: Hi anybody that remembers me

 

[tynopik]

if you don't designate them as spares, they should just be treated as a regular drive and it shouldn't be an issue

until you actually setup a raid, it should treat the drives just like a regular ide controller

i also think you would want to run your 80gb straight off your motherboard ide ports so don't have to worry about drivers and booting and anything

motherboard chan 1-> 80gb
motherboard chan 2-> optical
tx2000 raid 1 -> (2) x 40gb
tx2000 single drive (non spare) -> 30gb