Raid Config Needed

[Mattitude]

I want to configure my rig to have raid running. i have the following hard drives in my rig.

Western Digital Caviar 4 x 250GB
1 x 500GB

I want to Raid 0 2 x 250GB C:\ being my System D:\ being my Programs

Could i then Raid my remaining hard drives 2 x 250GB and a 500GB in raid 5?

Im a noob at this as its my first raid setup and i have no backup for my storage atm.

So any other solutions would be cool

BTW this is not a new build so data are on these hard drives is it still possible to setup a raid when an operating system is in play?

 

[rpstewart]

Im a noob at this as its my first raid setup and i have no backup for my storage atm.

Firstly RAID is not a backup, all it provides (with the exception of RAID0) is hardware redundancy. If you (or something else) delete a file it's still gone.

2x250 in RAID0 is fine, no problems with doing that. 2x250 & 1x500 in RAID5 isn't a great idea, firstly unless your using a board with one of the Intel Matrix controllers then you'll lose half of the 500 on top of the 250Gb you'll lose running RAID5 so 1Tb of disks will yield 500Gb of space. Secondly the write performance of onboard RAID5 is poor, usually less than single disk performance due to the overhead of the parity calculations. There are reports that the new Intel ICH9R controller is better but it's still not perfect.

If you want to go RAID for the OS then you will need to re-install normally. There are ways round it but they're a complete faff and only work if you have more than one SATA controller available.