Decisions, decision...and help with installing.

ash_scotland88 · 15 Aug 2008 at 17:42

Basically Iam getting a new computer, its an "old" server from some-one else but basically is still pretty top of the range.
q9450, 8gb ram...only downside is the graphics card.
now the thing is it comes with 2tb of hard-drive 4x500gb
so was thinking having 1tb in raid0, 500gb as like an other drive. and then shove 500gb in a removable hard-drive. What do poeple think of this?

if this is the best way forward, how do i go about setting up raid and partitions in vista...was gonna dual boot with xp but he said 8gb of ram actually makes vista usable (what i moaned about the most from using vista on freinds computers evening like thier "start" menu was slow and laggy).

so..uhm...yeah
how do i said up raid0 and then partitions? and size of each partition.
chances are the 500gb in the machine will be a duplicate of the external one, which would actually have a triplicate of some stuff from the raid0 drives.

edit: also need suggestions for an enclosure. Maybe like £25max....thing is it wont be plugged in 24/7 so its not like it will have like uber cooling, which iam guess will help drive down the price....oooh also e-sata would be good.

wingnuttzz · 15 Aug 2008 at 17:50

with 4 hdd's like that, i would personally put 3 of them in raid 0+1 i think it is. This means you get the performance of Raid 0, but the data redundance of raid 1 (i.e, if one drive fails you can recover your data off the other drive)

with 3 drives in raid 0+1 it will give you 1tb of storage space

the way raid 0+1 works i believe is it scratters the data accross all 3 disks (as raid 0 would do) and it spreades a copy of the data out over the drives too (if this makes sense). So, if one of your drives fail, you just replace it (with another 500gb in your case) and there is enough data stored on the other drives to completly rebuild your new HDD to so its the same as the old one was (so no data loss at all)

i hope that makes sense, maybe someone else can explain it better

ash_scotland88 · 15 Aug 2008 at 18:21

yeah, that makes sens to me.
i think i'll probally end up doing that now.

fobose · 15 Aug 2008 at 18:56

I thought you need 4 drives for RAID 0+1? The array stripes the data, and the RAID 1 feature duplicates the stripe (which would require 2TB in this case?).