Raid ) adding third disc

[Greebo]

Okay I have two samsung 750 drives set up in raid 0 and partitioned as 250mb for operating system and the rest data under windows 7.

I have about 300gb of data.

Now my problem is I have just got my thirs 750gb drive back from warranty exchange and I was going to sell it but would get little for it so I thought about adding it to the raid array and having 3 drives.

The downside is that currently I have no means of backing up my data (I know, sad) so is there any way of adding the third drive without losing my data?

Or am I flogging a dead horse and I should either:

1. Just add the drive but not under raid and use it as my backup drive
2. Sell it and add some money and buy a nice ssd drive.
3. keep it for backup and add a ssd drive anyway

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

Hi Op

Really you don't see a great deal of advantage with RAID-0 for conventional HDs. Not when the access time latencies when moving the HD head are so large.

If you ain't backing up your data then you obviously don't consider it to be valuable!

I think you would need a sophisticated RAID-5 controller, etc. to simply add in an extra drive to an array (without first imaging off the data from the existing array).

This article might be of interest for seeing a real performance increase from an array of 3 large drives:
Accelerate Your Hard Drive By Short Stroking
In a nut shell your boot drive suffers more from latency issues then raw bandwidth... Most RAID controllers only make this worse by introducing more latency! Obviously a SSD would a better bet for performance.

Personally I would run your drives 3xHD RAID-5 or 2xHD RAID-1 leaving 1x HD as a cold-swap backup drive for your most crucial (pron) files. Then get a Crucial SSD as boot device.
It's definitely a good idea to separate the function of drives (OS and data) in a desktop. Reinstalling / upgrading your OS drive is made so much easier and safer (in terms of potential for unplanned data loss)!!

Bob

 

[Greebo]

Thanks for that comprehensive answer. I kinda new what the sensible answer would be but just wanted to check.
Short stroking looks interesting too. I have never come across that before.

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

np