RAID Vs. Multiple Backups

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dillon157

New Member
Hey guys, I have reached a delima. I have a few hard drives laying around (bought for xbox hacking projects) and I figured I should put them to use. I currently am using a 120Gb HDD as my master and an old 40gb HDD as my slave but I have another 160GB HDD that isn't being used. I was thinking of a few different options:

1.)Buy a PCI RAID controller and use my 160 and 120 for RAID 1
2.)Buy a PCI RAID controller and use my 160 and 120 for RAID 0
3.)Buy a 3 drive IDE Cable and just have 2 slave HDDs as backup drives (which seems like over kill and a waste of HDD space.)

To give you guys a little bit more info on what I want, I'm an absolute save freak but I'm also into speed. I know that RAID 0+1 would probably be ideal for this, but I don't feel like buying more HDDs and I understand that RAID 0+1 would require about 4 Hard drives.

What do you guys Suggest? Thanks!
 
I'm not sure if this is possible (I'm not hugely into RAIDing) but what about setting up the 120 and 40 in a RAID 0 and set that up in a RAID 1 with the 160?
 
I'm not sure if this is possible (I'm not hugely into RAIDing) but what about setting up the 120 and 40 in a RAID 0 and set that up in a RAID 1 with the 160?
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I dont think it is, but that would rock if it did work.

Here's a website that describes IDE RAIDing, (which untill just now, I didnt know was possible).

"The drives under RAID 0 should ideally be the same size but you can mix different sizes. The downside is that the system will treat all drives as if they were the size of the smallest drive. As an example, a 40Gb, 20Gb and 15Gb combination would be seen as a 45Gb (3 X 15Gb) system but still getting the 3 X speed improvement."

Another thing to add based on personal experience; I had a RAID 0 array that was my 74gb raptor and my 80gb caviar, and it was fast. The only problem is that the SATA cable became unplugged somehow while my comp was on, and it corrupted the data. Now one drive has gone out but the drives wont work at all together...

something to think about, Id try and do a RAID 1 or RAID 0+1; if you dont want to buy more drives, I say use the disks you have for RAID 1
 
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B[x] said:
I'm not sure if this is possible (I'm not hugely into RAIDing) but what about setting up the 120 and 40 in a RAID 0 and set that up in a RAID 1 with the 160?
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No thats not possible.

1.)Buy a PCI RAID controller and use my 160 and 120 for RAID 1
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Thats possible, but you will only have 120GB of actual storage caacity. However you will have a backup in case something goes wrong.

2.)Buy a PCI RAID controller and use my 160 and 120 for RAID 0
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You will only have 240GB, this wil increase performance but double the chance of hard drive failure.

3.)Buy a 3 drive IDE Cable and just have 2 slave HDDs as backup drives (which seems like over kill and a waste of HDD space.)
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You can only have two drives per channel.
 
Cool, sounds good. Thank you all for your help! I think I'll go with RAID 1 then, but just one question, will running RAID 1 alone decrease performance?
 
I totally forgot that RAID 0 was restricted by the lowest drive's capacity. Sorry, I was checking out of work at the time and wasn't thinking.

Going with that concept though, would it be possible to set up two 160s in a RAID 0 and then setting that up with a 320 in RAID 1?
 
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what do you mean? doy ou mean setting up a 320 gb raid 0 with 2 160's and then mirroring it with a single 360gb hdd? that wouldnt work. You could only have the doubled speed along with the mirroring copy 4 four drives in a RAID 0+1
 
Habanerosky said:
what do you mean? doy ou mean setting up a 320 gb raid 0 with 2 160's and then mirroring it with a single 360gb hdd?
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Yes, that's what I meant.

Habanerosky said:
that wouldnt work. You could only have the doubled speed along with the mirroring copy 4 four drives in a RAID 0+1
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Just double checking to make sure I understand correctly - to combine RAID 0 and RAID 1 you would need two pairs (4 HDDs total) of RAID 0, one of which mirrors the other?
 
I know you're all probably wondering when I'm going to stop asking questions but, does anyone recomend a particular pci RAID controller?
 
yep, it would be like 3 40gb hdds put in a raid 0 then another pair in raid 0. in RAID 0+1 one pair mirrors the other pair. It's the best because you get the high speed as well as the backup aspect.

Sorry, i have never used PCI controllers, i use integrated sadly (the mobo i have is a REAL pain in the ass for RAIDing)
 
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