How to add drives to Raid 1 setup

H

Hidalgo

New Member
Hi guys. New here to this board. Need some help......

We built a machine about 6 months ago with two 74g Raptors running in a Raid 1 setup on a A8N-Sli board.

My son now realizes that he needs more storage. The question is, can we add two more raptors to this configuration without losing anything? And will the machine automatically add the info to the two new drives, or just store what is needed after the addition?

I am pretty computer literate, but this is our first time with a Raid setup.

Thanks for any advice!
 
I'm quite sure you'll have to format and start from scratch if you wish to add to the raid... As cool(and FREAKING FAST) as a quad raid of Raptors would be, your best bet would be to have an additional "storage" drive.

Edit...

Wait wait wait... Are you running RAID 1 or RAID 0?
 
Hmm... I know there's some way to have striped and mirrored going together, but I've personally never tried it. But, I'm pretty sure you'll still have to loose your information and start over, regardless of the RAID setup...
 
You need a minimum of 4 drives for a mirrored stripe setup (RAID 0+1) but you will have to reformat all the drives for this. If you want redundant storage go with a pair of 500GB (or something smaller if don't want that much space) 7200rpm drives and put those in their own RAID. Adding drives to your current array will only increase the fault tolerance not storage space.
 
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