Best way to stripe and mirror some drives?

[jackvdbuk]

Hi all,

looking to build in some redundancy,

i have a 4 TB drive id like to mirror to 2 2 TB drives for full redudancy.

best way of doing so? i dont mind software if required. the 4TB already has data on it.

running WHS - whats the best way of doing this?

[BattFink]

Do you have anyway of backing up the data, as normally you will lose any data on the drive when you create a raid array

What SATA controller do you have on the machine? Does it have any RAID capability? Ideally for RAID you will need to use identical size drives but you may be able to bodge together a raid 1 + 0 setup

[kalniel]

What SATA controller do you have on the machine? Does it have any RAID capability? Ideally for RAID you will need to use identical size drives but you may be able to bodge together a raid 1 + 0 setup

Think he's looking for 0+1 rather than 1+0 in RAID terms. But probably simpler to create a spanned volume across the two 2TB disks then use the drive mirror in WHS. Should work without loosing data but obviously, back up first.

Not quite the same setup, but some useful info here:
http://connecteddigitalworld.com/201...video-edition/

[jackvdbuk]

its a HP microserver, i tried that kalniel but it doesnt allow to after spanning the two 2TBs it will not give me the option to "mirror" as just greyed out. the span has enough storage to mirror the 4TB drive but no luck.

[jim]

Can you not RAID the two 2TB drives in the BIOS?

[BattFink]

I would create a RAID 0 array in the BIOS first

This will give Windows the 2 4TB drives, once you've done that create the mirror

Are the drives configured as dynamic drives?

[bouncy]

Id personally just use the built in raid bios configuration which your motherboard will most likely have. you will most likely need to go into the bios, switch the controller from either legacy or ahci to raid, then another option would come up with a raid bios when you next reboot the system. in that you can create a mirror'd config, but you wont be able to use the 4tb disc in your 2tb mirror'd config.

[Vimeous]

Bit of a late post this but if you've not acted already might be useful ...

At a hardware level you can't have 2 drives act as one to mirror and equally sized single drive AFAIK.
With your 3 drives the hardware setup you'd have to consider is RAID5 where all 3 drives are in the RAID array. Because all drives in a RAID5 array must be equal in size to the smallest drive in the array your 4+2+2 would become 2+2+2 with the remaining 2TB inaccessible.
The preformatted result would be 4TB with 1 drive redundancy. Loose more than 1 drive and the data in non recoverable.

RAID5 is great for general file storage but read performance is not great compared to other RAID types so I'd avoid it for game installs and the like.

.....

LOL - just read your system. Yes NAS is another answer!

[jackvdbuk]

vimeous, funny you mention RAID5, i had my array in raid5 and one drive was nigh on dead according to hard drive sentinel. i read online and the amount of rebuild horror stories with RAID5 was worrying!

so just went with mirroring for 100% redudancy