RAID1 with Three SSD

Lexeus · 4 Dec 2013 at 23:08

Hi,

I currently have 2x64GB SSD's in RAID1, and I want to increase capacity without losing redundancy.
I was wondering if it's possible to setup a 128Gb RAID1 with the two 64Gb SSDs storing half and a new 128Gb SSD storing the other half of the mirror.

They would all be Crucial M4 drives.

Many thanks for any advice

kefan77 · 4 Dec 2013 at 23:13

bump for interest. so far I thought you can only RAID1 2 physical drives.

JonJ678 · 5 Dec 2013 at 19:31

Sort of. You could put two 64gb drives in raid 0 to get a very fast 128gb volume. You can then place that in raid1 with a 128gb drive to get a redundant 128gb volume which performs about twice as fast as the single 128gb ssd.

This is probably not a good idea, but it would work OK.

Lexeus · 5 Dec 2013 at 20:17

Thanks for the reply

How would you go about doing that?

My motherboard has RAID onboard, would I need an additional, external, RAID controller?
Or would I just put the 64Gb drives in RAID 0 on the RAID controller and then use software RAID to create a RAID 1 from the two 128GB volumes?

InfiniteNoise · 6 Dec 2013 at 08:40

JonJ678 said:
Sort of. You could put two 64gb drives in raid 0 to get a very fast 128gb volume. You can then place that in raid1 with a 128gb drive to get a redundant 128gb volume which performs about twice as fast as the single 128gb ssd.

This is probably not a good idea, but it would work OK.

I'm not sure if that will work well, how does the system deal with mirroring data to a volume that's potentially twice as slow?

IAmATeaf · 6 Dec 2013 at 20:18

@JonJ678 - You're talking effectively about RAID 10 aren't you? To do that using hardware you'd need a RAID controller capable of doing that. For example in my server which has 2 RAID cards only 1 of the cards is capable of doing RAID 10.

DoneADougalOnSofa · 6 Dec 2013 at 20:32

I think RAID 5 is two striping, and one backup...

Fahim · 16 Dec 2013 at 20:33

This can be done in a different way. If you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8, you can use disk management to create a stripped RAID0 volume using the 2 x 64GB SSD. Then you can join this RAID0 volume and the 128GB SSD in another RAID1 array by using the mirrored volume option in disk manager.

It is a software solution, but it will work.