Questions on hard drives.

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korgoth

New Member
sorry if this question has already been answered, but i have 3 external hard drives from different manufacturers, and id like to know if it was possible to raid them so i dont have to navigate through all of them seperately.

it sucks having 4 different hard drive shortcuts on my desktop.


also, im looking to get more hard drive space, and wondering what would be the best/cheapest option. what would you recommend if you wanted to build or buy something that was over 6 terabytes, with potential to have.. maybe twice that or more. Id network it into my wireless router so i had access to it from any computer in the house.


also, how often to these things burn out? i have these hdd's on 24 hours a day
 
well if you dnt need to use the ability to move the hard drives from computer to computer i would sudgest opeing them and taking the hard drive out and get a raid 0 pci card and raid them
 
sorry if this question has already been answered, but i have 3 external hard drives from different manufacturers, and id like to know if it was possible to raid them so i dont have to navigate through all of them seperately.

it sucks having 4 different hard drive shortcuts on my desktop.
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If you want to keep them external and you have Windows XP Pro (Vista probably has similar options, but I haven't used it) you can try a software RAID (instructions here and here). I'm not sure how it will work with USB drives but it might be worth a try. Of course you increase the chances of losing all of your data.

also, im looking to get more hard drive space, and wondering what would be the best/cheapest option. what would you recommend if you wanted to build or buy something that was over 6 terabytes, with potential to have.. maybe twice that or more. Id network it into my wireless router so i had access to it from any computer in the house.
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Simplest would just get 6 1 TB drives. I'm not sure about the $/GB but it saves the hastle of more drives. If its important data you'll probably want a RAID 5 controller and an extra drive (or two for automatic rebuilding). Not sure if you want recommendations for the whole system, but any server type case with several hd slots and good cooling would work, and as long as it's strictly a server any components that you trust not to fail will work (i.e. a Pentium III would be adequate).

also, how often to these things burn out? i have these hdd's on 24 hours a day
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There's really no way to tell. You could get a bad drive that will fail after a month or it could last you 30 years. Some drive manufacturers will state the annual failure rate, so according to Seagate their drives statistically have a %0.34 chance of failure in a year.
 
thanks for the replies. Alright, so if i do set up a raid, either a softare or hardware raid, would i have to start with freshly formatted drives, or could i keep all the information on the drives and stil set one up.

i think i might just leave the externals and buy a new server with at least 3 terabytes for now. What is the advantage of having a motherboard and chip that is a lot faster. You said pentium 3 would be sufficient, but i keep seeing one rackable server that has a dual core 3.06 xeon. do i need something that fast? It is just going to be used at home. I might stick it online ne day but not for a while.
 
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For RAID 0 you will need to reformat since the data needs to be striped across the multiple drives. For RAID 1 you can usually keep the data on one drive and mirror it.

If you're looking at buying a server from a company that's probably going to be overkill, i.e. the 3.06 GHz Xeon. Those servers are meant to run applications for client machines and basically be all-around workhorses. If you are just going to be using it as a file server your only concerns are quality (not breaking) and if it will house all the components for now and the future.
 
Don't do RAID 0 for god's sake. Geez, these fanboys are unstoppable, despite the facts.

If you want anything like that, you want JBOD. Anyways, Windows has the ability to join them through software. XP and up.
 
lol thats funny, cause i think raid0 was what i was looking for sort of.

i dont really want to stripe them across all the drives though because i know its risky, i just want to be able to navigate by just using one folder.

is there a way to keep a jbod and just have the files look like they are located on the same drive?
 
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