RAID 5 question - 2 x 320 + 1 x 500?

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Caporegime
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Ok I have a RAID question and would appreciate it if someone could clear it up for me.

I'm getting the Gigabyte DS3P and want to use the following storage configuration with an aim to achieve RAID 0 speeds with redundancy:

2 x 320Gb Seagate 7200.10 + 1 x 500Gb WDYS or KS

I'd want to set up the two Seagates in RAID 0 but protect the data with mirroring on the Western Dig.

Two questions:

- Does RAID 5 support two different hard drives and capacities
- Does the DS3P do an effective job of RAID apart from RAID 0 and RAID 1 or will I require a seperate controller card to do this effectively?

Many thanks.
 
Ok thanks for the replies guys. It sounds like 2 x 320 in RAID 0 + 1 x 500 storage is good advice.

RAID 5 confuses me though. How can you have redundancy plus striping when you only have three disks of the same capacity? E.g. x = size of one disk, 2x = size of striping array, therefore you can only ever back up half of your striped data?? Obviously this is wrong but would be grateful if you could put me right.
 
Gotcha, thanks for that. RAID is a science in itself!

I'm also thinking about saving a bit of cash by buying a couple of SATA converters and using my current two WD 120Gb IDE drives instead of a new SATA for specific daily scheduled backups to run overnight, but I'm worried about two things:

- will the IDE drives slow down the rest of the system in any way (apart from obviously when running the backup)
- do drives generally make any noise at idle as I want this to be a really quiet system

Many thanks.

EDIT - if I go down the above route then could I not also set up the IDE drives in RAID 0 for increased backup speed? Granted this is riskier but I'd be v unlucky if both RAID arrays failed! The only problem with this is - does the DS3 support RAID for IDE drives on SATA channels?
 
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Ahha of course! Windows has an HDD power down facility. That's my answer then. Finally - any idea on my IDE / RAID question? Sorry for asking lots of questions of you, but this has been very helpful and it's my last question, promise!
 
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