Multiple Raids/

aroundthebay

I have 2 seagate 160gb hard drives and 1 WD 640GB caviar black at the moment

Can I raid1 the 2 seagate drives for the OS, (I don't really trust them anymore) and keep my new 640gb seperate for storage? That wouldn't cause any issues?

Also I was thinking in the near future of picking up 3 more 640GB Black Caviars, am I able to have 2 sperate raids setup at once?

I was thinking a Raid1 with the 2 160GB OS drives, and a Raid5 with the 4 640GB caviar blacks? Not sure if this is even possible.

Also when setting up a new raid5 do you have to format all the drives? Cause the 1 640GB will probably be full at the time, would I have to find storage for that stuff before I set it up?

furball zen

What mobo do you have first off? Mine has 4 sets of sata ports that can run 2 diff RAIDs. One is off the south bridge, another is a software RAID. I dont know about running RAID on more than 2 drives at a time though, meaning i doubt you can do 4 in 1 RAID setup.

aroundthebay

I just ordered the ASUS P5Q ATX LGA775 motherboard,
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...nufacture=ASUS

It has 8 sata ports, which would be good for my proprosed 6 hard drives, 1 dvdrw, and ESATA port

My case, the enermax uber chakra has a 6 slot hard drive bay as well so that would fit fine.

I was under the impression that Raid5 would take multiple drives and write across all of them in a way that if 1 failed the array would stay intact, if I had 4 drives the total capacity would be only 3/4 of the total drive space though

SO I would want to do that on the 4 larger drives, and a Raid1 (mirrored on the drives with the OS)

Irish2685

You are correct about the multiple drive thing in RAID 5. In fact, it can not be done with less than three drives.