Building a RAID, options for later?

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mhenley

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 21, 2001
Messages
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Motherboard- Asus M4A785TD-V EVO
Drives- 2x WD Black 1TB, 2x Seagate 7200.12 1TB
(all drives working as single right now)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Currently, the two WD Black drives are in use with critical data that I don't want to lose. I'm wanting to build a RAID 0 array using the empty Seagate drives and copy all data from the WD Black drives into the array. After I copy and verify that all data is safe, will I then be able to blank the WD Black drives and add those to the existing array? The end goal is RAID 10, but I will take RAID 01 if the controller doesn't support 10 (haven't checked yet).
 
It sounds like you are proposing a plan that will result, at least for a time, in you only having one copy of "critical data that I don't want to lose". If so, bad, bad idea. Critical data should, AT ALL TIMES, have multiple copies.
 
I was planning on temporarily using some external USB drives to hold data so that I can free up the WD Blacks for the mirror, I just need to know if I can add the mirror after building the stripe.
 
Only the Intel RAID controller has migration software that can migrate RAID level of expand the stripe width; AMD can't do this i believe.
 
I'm not looking to expand the stripe width, just adding a mirror to the existing stripe. Since I don't see any "yes" answers I will assume "no". I will be building my RAID 10 from scratch on 4 empty drives.
 
Any change like this will require migration support. And what is supported will vary by the raid.
 
mhenley said:
After I copy and verify that all data is safe, will I then be able to blank the WD Black drives and add those to the existing array? The end goal is RAID 10, but I will take RAID 01 if the controller doesn't support 10 (haven't checked yet).
Click to expand...

No, you must be using the exact same drives (make, model, size, etc.). Also, RAID 10 is not nearly as good as RAID 6. RAID 10 will only allow 1 drive to fail and will also cut your disk space in half if four drives are used. RAID 6 will also do this, but it will allow up to two drives to fail before the array is destroyed.

RAID 5 is your best bet since it will allow one disk to fail and will only eat up 1/4 of your drive space giving you more storage.

If four drives are used:

Best fail-safe: RAID 6 > RAID 5 > RAID 10
Best storage space: RAID 5 > RAID 6 = RAID 10
Best performance: RAID 10 > RAID 5 > RAID 6


However, mission critical data should not be on any form of RAID 0, be it 10 or 01. RAID 5 or preferably 6 should be used, along with either tape backup or an external drive or blu-ray discs, imo. Depends on how valuable the data is.
 
I finally got a response back from Asus, RAID 10 isn't supported by the onboard controller, but 01 is. Thank you Red Falcon but I'm not willing to sacrifice the performance by going with parity or double parity. I'm fine with the storage space loss.

It was my understanding that drives could be mismatched on make and model as long as they had the same storage space and cache and were on separate arrays. Meaning a pair of 1TB WD drives and a pair of 1TB Seagate. If I am mistaken on this, then I need to buy two more drives. Thank you for pointing this out.
 
Ok, you do have to get two more drives since they need to be the same make and model. Good luck with RAID 01 and make sure to do backups of any critical data often. ;)
 
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