Raid (or not?) for a hard drive newbie, some questions.

[Scott Salisbury]

Ok. I've just bought myself a 320GB WD Caviar hard drive and I'm putting it in a download PC I've just set up (you may have saw my other thread in general hardware).

I also have a 200GB WD Caviar I bought earlier last year which is about 60% full. I understand that you can use raid to join two hard drives together to make one logical drive? So in 'My Computer' it will show just one drive with the total space between them as one drive? In the hard drive FAQs sticky I think it said this isn't a raid array but a JBOD (just a bunch of disks?) setup.

Here's some questions:
1. Am I on the right track?
2. Will my motherboard need any fancy stuff for this? All I know is it has 2 sata connectors on the mobo and has raid utilities on the cd provided.
3. Is it possible to join the two hard drives together without losing the data currently on my 200gb hard drive? Or is some formatting involved?
4. Will it work using a 320gb and a 200gb? Or do they have to be exactly the same drives?

If anybody can shed some light on this, would be greatly appricated,
Scott.

 

[semi-pro waster]

1) Why do you want to create it as a JBOD array? It won't add anything in terms of speed but it does add complications and I'm not sure how JBOD works in the event of one drives failure.

2) The Raid utilities don't necessarily mean that you have Raid capabilities because motherboard manufacturers will make 1 CD for say 6 different motherboard models to save costs. Your motherboard manual will tell you what is supported though

3) I'm not sure with JBOD, you might be able to join them simply.

4) If it was a proper Raid array then it is much better if both drives are the same size but for JBOD I believe they can be any size. Technically you can join two different sizes into Raid but you will only get the space of the smallest drive.

 

[Scott Salisbury]

Ok thanks. I didn't want JBOS in particular, all I want is to join my two drives to get a total of 500gb instead of a seperate 300gb and 200gb hard drive. I just said JBOS as I don't know the difference and must have misunderstood the FAQs.

It doesn't sound like its possible to do what I want, nor do I think my mobo suports it.

Thanks for the reply.