Help a guy out, complex RAID stuff? :S

[British IT Bod]

Hey everyone, I'm going to be building a machine, but I just wanted to check some stuff about drives.

What I'm going for is;
2 x 480GB SSDs in RAID 0 for Windows and my games
1 x 2TB as a standalone for all my other media

Then here is the question, I wanted to backup / mirror those 3 drives as a whole, onto a 3TB disk, so that for example it would be like a "RAID 0" (well reading the data from 2 places) between the 2TB and the 3TB because the 3TB would have all of the data on the 2TB, and then the 2 SSD's would be like a 3 way RAID 0 reading from the SSDs and the 3TB, but the thing I want to know, is firstly if that if this is possible, and if it is, will there be fault tolerance? IE, say 1 of the SSDs fails and the RAID 0 array is destroyed, will the 3TB still contain all of the data that was on the SSDs? Also the same with the 2TB drive?

I just wanted to see if I could tap into the unused read power of the 3TB drive, because otherwise I'll just use a portable 3TB hard disk and just backup both the 2TB and the RAID 0 SSD array onto that every night.

Thanks
-BrITBod

 

[paintguy]

Go for your second option

 

[eddyr]

I think you mean raid 1 the 2TB media drive with a 2TB partition from the 3TB HDD for the redundancy/fault tolerance.

With regard the ssd/hdd 3 way raid 0 there would be no redundancy if any drive failed. The hdd would seriously impact performance negatively with 1/3 of written & read data coming from the higher latency slow random read hdd. Not even sure if it is possible to set up - don't see why not but the controller or software may prevent you becasue of the above hit.

A better option would be to raid 0 the ssd's and then raid 1 the 960GB SSD array (raid 0 + 1) with the remaining TB on the 3TB HDD but I dont know if this is possible/easy to set up. Presumably the raid controller/software would have to be designed to preferentially choose the ssd's over the hdd for disk reads and writes otherwise again a negative per hit. Hopefully someone more familiar with raid arrays can advise.

Personally for ease I would go option 2 image both the ssd array and the 2TB drive at regular intervals to the 3TB.