RAID 1+0

streetkid

Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2003
Messages
871
Hello,

I'm building a new computer and have come across 4 80gb seagate sata drives for free and was wondering what to do with them.

Since they're so small in capacity, I didn't want to use them for just storage. So I was thinking of using them in a raid1+0 configuration and loading my os (winxp) to it, then just having a larger single drive for media storage.

I really don't do anything crazy with my computer, am I just wasting my time trying to set up this configuration?, will the operating system and programs installed on it take advantage?

Thanks for the advice
 
The drives are probably so slow that any speed benefit you'd see from RAID0 would be negligible compared to a modern 7200RPM drive with higher density platters. I'd use them as external backup drives or as an OS drive for a server, but other than that they're pretty useless.
 
Eh, I'd just try to sell each 80GB for $20 a pop locally and then use the $80 to get a terabyte drive or something.
 
Yeah, I pretty much figured it'd be a waste of time. Just to note, they are new harddrives, 7200.10 baracudas, they're really thin too, w/e that means.
 
then would it be worth it to raid 1 two drives for the os? or really come to think of it, the drive I would want to be redundant would be the drive with all my data, who cares about the os..
 
7200.11 baracuda's are decent drives, problably off a Dell Optiplex 750 or HP right? Put these in raid 0 then create a raid 1 array using 2 x 2TB drives. I have a workstation at work with three of these in raid 0 for my OS, then I changed the target locations for folders like My docs, My Pics and so forth to my raid 1 array. If the OS dies who cares. I've had these in raid 0 for a couple of years with no issues, and performace is as follows 200MB+ reads with 75MB+ writes which is not bad at all for free in your case. Make sure you enable write-caching on these puppies.
 
If you got them for free then you may as well stick them in a big RAID 0, or RAID 10 if your controller supports it, and see what it can do. Not for your important data, though :p
 
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