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Want to RAID my storage drives in new build.

Krynj

Krynj

Platinum Member
I know nothing about RAID. I know what it means, and I'm vaguely familiar with the different types of RAID configurations, but I've simply never felt the need to RAID my drives before.

In my new build, I'm going to start it with 2 or 3 of these, depending on what Best Buy has in stock:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+...&skuId=9234465

All these will be used for is storage. Right now I have 2x1TB drives, and both are used for storing movies, TV shows, and music that is streamed via Wi-Fi to my Boxee Box. I like to keep my media organized, so it kind of annoys me that I can't fit all my HD movies on one drive.

Is there a RAID configuration that will allow 3x2TB drives to show up as one huge 6GB drive? I know Raid 5 does this, but at the expense of one drive's capacity, so it would actually only show as 4TB. I'm not worried about error checking, or redundancy, I just want to know if I can make 3x2TB drives show up as one 6GB drive.

Thanks in advance.
 
Raid 0 would have all the drives act as one and speed up read/write times but if any of the drives goes then you lose all your data. JBOD I don't know much about but it should have all the drives act as one and you'd only lose the information on the drive that fails rather than all of them.

another possibility would be if you were to raid 0 your two 1TB drives together you could make a raid5 of that and your 3 2TB drives and have your 6TB like you want.
 
Krynj said:
I know nothing about RAID. I know what it means, and I'm vaguely familiar with the different types of RAID configurations, but I've simply never felt the need to RAID my drives before.

In my new build, I'm going to start it with 2 or 3 of these, depending on what Best Buy has in stock:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+...&skuId=9234465

All these will be used for is storage. Right now I have 2x1TB drives, and both are used for storing movies, TV shows, and music that is streamed via Wi-Fi to my Boxee Box. I like to keep my media organized, so it kind of annoys me that I can't fit all my HD movies on one drive.

Is there a RAID configuration that will allow 3x2TB drives to show up as one huge 6GB drive? I know Raid 5 does this, but at the expense of one drive's capacity, so it would actually only show as 4TB. I'm not worried about error checking, or redundancy, I just want to know if I can make 3x2TB drives show up as one 6GB drive.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
forget the controllers mumbo. Do a software raid inside windows. Diskmanagement---->Convert to dynamic disks---->done
 
I think I read somewhere that doing a software RAID can decrease system performance.
 
Krynj said:
I think I read somewhere that doing a software RAID can decrease system performance.
Click to expand...

Depends on the software and the RAID level. There's no parity calculations for RAID0 which is what you would need to use to get the full capacity out of all 3 drives. However there's no redundancy at all and losing 1 drive means you lose the entire array. RAID0 is an accident waiting to happen and should be avoided in all situations except for things like scratch drives where losing the data doesn't matter.

LiuKangBakinPie said:
no it doesnt. same as raid wont increase performance when its used for storage. Fact software raid is almost as fast as the hardware. Only thing is you can use it to place a OS on it and boot for it
Click to expand...

I haven't really heard any good things about Windows software RAID and a pretty major downside to it is that very few 3rd party tools support dynamic disks.
 
The RAID drives will just be media. Movies, TV shows, and music that I can easily get again if anything should happen.

So what would happen if I did lose a drive? I understand all 3 drives would be wiped out, but couldn't the remaining drives just need a format?

All important stuff will be on my SSD and VelociRaptor, plus backed up to DVD/online backup services.
 
Just as a FYI, the reason a lot of people are suggesting parity is that even if you can get everything again, losing 6TB of data and restoring at 100MB/s (which you won't do unless you have a good NAS with everything backed up) takes well over 16.5 hours. If you try reloading physical media, that means that you are swapping disks + waiting for 16.5 hours and that is after you get a drive to replace the failed drive and rebuild the array.
 
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