RAID question

F

flwolf

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2003
Messages
403
Here is the scenario: four 1TB drives and I want redundancy for at least 2TB of data. I know that with 2 drives you can just mirror one to the other, but what RAID setup would I use in order to have at least 2TB of storage with the other 2TB being used as backup?

Thanks.
 
RAID10. Mirror sets of two drives, then stipe the two mirrored sets together.
 
My Asus A8N-SLI motherboard does not support RAID 10. Is it possible to have two RAID 1's running at the same time?
 
Does it support Raid 5? 3 of your drives will support a 2 TB RAID 5 array. Otherwise you are SOL. RAID 6 would be even better as it could support 2 drive failures.

Just remember that RAID anything is not a replacement for a separate offline backup copy of your data.

Don
 
flwolf said:
Here is the scenario: four 1TB drives and I want redundancy for at least 2TB of data. I know that with 2 drives you can just mirror one to the other, but what RAID setup would I use in order to have at least 2TB of storage with the other 2TB being used as backup?
Click to expand...

RAID is not a backup so you would want separate volumes, main usage + backup. Realistically, you're not going to get a 2TB array + 2TB backup with only four drives unless you're doing two stripes which offers no redundancy.

flwolf said:
My Asus A8N-SLI motherboard does not support RAID 10. Is it possible to have two RAID 1's running at the same time?
Click to expand...

Yes, you could do two mirrors. You would only have 1TB for main storage and 1TB for backup, though.
 
flwolf said:
My Asus A8N-SLI motherboard does not support RAID 10. Is it possible to have two RAID 1's running at the same time?
Click to expand...

Are you planning on using NVRAID, or do you have one of the A8N-SLI's with the Silicon Image RAID chip? Do you have a 5th hard drive that you can boot from? What operating system is going to be on this machine, and are you flexible in OS choice?
 
flwolf said:
My Asus A8N-SLI motherboard does not support RAID 10. Is it possible to have two RAID 1's running at the same time?
Click to expand...

Sure, you could make two arrays and then back up your primary to your secondary.
 
Well he wants 2 TB of data. To do that you would need to go the RAID 5 route, which is 2.72TB of space. Not really backing it up, but you are protected against one drive failure.
Or you could spread the data up over two RAID 1 arrays. Also, not really backing up but protected against one drive failure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top