Third 1TB Hard Drive

[Lonz]

I'll need to purchase my third 1TB hard drive in the near future. And this has got me thinking about RAID-5ing them all together for the extra speed and reliability. However, I don't know anyone with 3 TB of free space to back my data up onto, so I'm not sure about the best way of going about this. Has anyone tried it before?

They'll more than likely become nothing more than data storage, for my films and music, as I'm soon going to be purchasing an SSD for the OS.

Any ideas?
Cheers.

 

[rpstewart]

A few things to consider:

1) If you RAID5 3x1Tb you'll get 2Tb of usable space, the other 1Tb is taken up by parity data for the array. If you want a 3Tb volume you'll need 4 disks.

2) If you do go for a 3Tb volume then you'll need something else to boot from. A standard PC can't boot from a drive/array larger than 2Tb even if it's partitioned.

3) RAID5, like RAID1, is a redundancy solution. It's not the same as a backup. So if you're struggling to find space to back up your data now I would consider resolving that issue before getting any more live space.

 

[Lonz]

Thanks, you've cleared some things up for me. Now I've got to reconsider a few things!

 

[mrtckane]

i wouldn't even raid it.

i have two 1.5tb disks and a 1tb disk, one's for films, one's for tv shows and the third one is documents, photos, games (installers, isos, emulators etc, not actually installed games) and music.

i kinda like that setup.
at some point i'm sticking 2x2tb disks in, then eventually replacing the other 3 disks that are already there with 2tb models. i'm up to 4tb, i want 10tb. no point raiding though as it'll be 5tb for stuff and 5tb for backup.

since the disks are already fast enough to serve music & video locally and across the network, raid is of no use to me.

if i were you i'd work out why you need it before you do anything else.