Daft RAID Q: 2x2TB + 2x1TB

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Don
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I currently have 2x 1TB drives in my media machine in RAID1 config, this stores all my movies/tv shows/music once ripped.

Im needing some more room so was thinking of grabbin 2x2TB before the prices go any crazier, Initial thought was again just RAID1 them.

Is thre anyway that both the 2TB and the 1TB drives can be implemented into the same array? Or would I instantly loose half of the 2TB to make them the same size as the 1TB?

Stupid question finished :p
 
Raid 1 can only be two disks, if you set up two Raid 1 arrays you will end up with 3Tb of storage. If you put all 4 disks into a raid 5 or raid 0+1 then they will all be seen as 1TB drives and will give you 3Tb and 2Tb arrays respectively.

There is a good raid calculator here.
 
The only way to combine these disks without loosing disk space would be to see if your RAID controller supports JBOD. Whilst this will present your bundle of disks as 1 volume, it won't give you redundancy though!
 
I'd put the 2x1 Tb into raid 0, and leave the 2 Tb ones unraided. Use one 2 Tb drive to manually back up your Raid 0 data, and the other for anything else.

Just like mine:

harddrives.png


I only have 1 DVD RW drive, but it detects several for some reason including a BD drive :x
 
As I thought yeah :(
The Controller Im using is just the Intel one on my mobo, ASus P5QPro.
Using striped on this machine and mirrored on the media box, not had any issues with these and always had decent performance, Sammy F1 320 in here (2 disk array also).

Whats the minimum to sensure max storage available but also redundancy? 3x2TBs in raid 6 maybe?
 
Whats the minimum to sensure max storage available but also redundancy? 3x2TBs in raid 6 maybe?

The Intel controller doesn't support RAID 6 so you'd be looking at RAID 5.

You need a minimum of 3 disks and the capacity of RAID 5, assuming all the disks are the same size, is the disk size x (the number of disks -1).

So 3x2TB disks would give 4TB of storage, 4x2TB disks would give 6TB of storage etc.

The read speed of RAID 5 is good but the write speed can be quite low due to the parity calculations.
 
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