Is it possible to have RAID 1 on top of a Spanned Volume?

[Arlen10]

If I setup two 2TB drives in a 4TB spanned volume, will I be able to setup redundancy to 2 other drives in RAID 1? Can I do this in Windows or what software would you recommend for RAID configurations such as this?

 

[martinch]

Sounds a lot like RAID 1+0 (aka RAID-10)...

 

[Eximo]

Usually one would do this in hardware, using the onboard RAID controller or a more specialized add in card.

Raid 0+1 is what you are looking for I believe. Two striped volumes mirrored to another striped set. I don't believe the mirrored volume absolutely has to be a matching set and can just be a large backup disk.

Your board does support RAID10 which is a bit different, but achieves your goal. This will mirror each drive in the striped array.

 

[Arlen10]

Usually one would do this in hardware, using the onboard RAID controller or a more specialized add in card.

Raid 0+1 is what you are looking for I believe. Two striped volumes mirrored to another striped set. I don't believe the mirrored volume absolutely has to be a matching set and can just be a large backup disk.

Your board does support RAID10 which is a bit different, but achieves your goal. This will mirror each drive in the striped array.

I won't be using my system for this. I'll be setting up a new computer for this. I know about RAID 10, I want to see if its possible to accomplish this with just spanning the drives in windows and setting up redundancy separately. Where the drives fill up 1 at a time rather than stripped evenly.

 

[Eximo]

So JBOD with a backup? You can just use scheduled tasks for that.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Dd834883.aspx

 

[boosted1g]

You can use software raid to create a raid 1 mirror of a spanned jbod volume.

You will be better off though just doing a scheduled backup though, preferably with versioning/shadow-copy if you have enough disk space.
RAID 1 is just a duplicate of the data, great for disk failure, useless for file corruption or accidental deletion.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Usually one would do this in hardware, using the onboard RAID controller or a more specialized add in card.

Raid 0+1 is what you are looking for I believe. Two striped volumes mirrored to another striped set. I don't believe the mirrored volume absolutely has to be a matching set and can just be a large backup disk.

Your board does support RAID10 which is a bit different, but achieves your goal. This will mirror each drive in the striped array.

I won't be using my system for this. I'll be setting up a new computer for this. I know about RAID 10, I want to see if its possible to accomplish this with just spanning the drives in windows and setting up redundancy separately. Where the drives fill up 1 at a time rather than stripped evenly.

No RAID solution will fill up each drive 1 at a time. You either have performance, redundancy or a mix of both.

There is RAID 0+1 which will stripe two sets of two drives then make the second set a redundancy of the first set.

RAID 5 is striping with one parity bit (drive).

RAID 6 is the same as RAID 5 bit adds a second parity bit (drive) to the mix.

But no matter which you go for there will always be striping or redundancy and all drives will be used in some way unless it is a parity drive.

 

[Arlen10]

What do you guys think about going the RAID 0 route and setting up timed backups to a network drive.

 

[boosted1g]

What do you guys think about going the RAID 0 route and setting up timed backups to a network drive.

Depends on the content.

If OS or files often read/overwritten then that is a great solution.

If this is for movies then there is no benefit in raid 0, just keep spanned volume.

 

[Arlen10]

I forgot to mention I am setting up multiple SSD drives under one volume (either RAID 0 or Spanning). I want to backup to a HDD so I don't want to loose performance with RAID 1. ( my intentions are bit revised since posting this. originally was going to go with more SSDs as RAID 1 but that sounds too expensive compared to just timed backups)

 

[boosted1g]

Usually one would do this in hardware, using the onboard RAID controller or a more specialized add in card.

Raid 0+1 is what you are looking for I believe. Two striped volumes mirrored to another striped set. I don't believe the mirrored volume absolutely has to be a matching set and can just be a large backup disk.

Your board does support RAID10 which is a bit different, but achieves your goal. This will mirror each drive in the striped array.

I won't be using my system for this. I'll be setting up a new computer for this. I know about RAID 10, I want to see if its possible to accomplish this with just spanning the drives in windows and setting up redundancy separately. Where the drives fill up 1 at a time rather than stripped evenly.

No RAID solution will fill up each drive 1 at a time. You either have performance, redundancy or a mix of both.

There is RAID 0+1 which will stripe two sets of two drives then make the second set a redundancy of the first set.

RAID 5 is striping with one parity bit (drive).

RAID 6 is the same as RAID 5 bit adds a second parity bit (drive) to the mix.

But no matter which you go for there will always be striping or redundancy and all drives will be used in some way unless it is a parity drive.

I believe the OP is using a software solution to have a spanned JBOD volume.

I use a software solution called flexraid on my server. I have 2 4TB drive and 1 3TB drive spanned together as one volume. The drives fill up individually as if they were JBOD. I then have another 4tb drive that the software calculates parity on once a week.
This setup is for media drives so the only changes are newly added files. Thus this setup gives me the parity of raid5, but without the abuse of RAID 5, and if I were to loose both parity and another drive I just lost the data on that individual drive. I also don't have near as high of a risk rebuilding a drive this way vs with RAID 5.
This setup is great for drives that have almost static data on them, would be down right awful for OS, or database or anything with many writes/overwrites.

 

[boosted1g]

I forgot to mention I am setting up multiple SSD drives under one volume (either RAID 0 or Spanning). I want to backup to a HDD so I don't want to loose performance with RAID 1. ( my intentions are bit revised since posting this. originally was going to go with more SSDs as RAID 1 but that sounds too expensive compared to just timed backups)

With SSD there is pretty much no gain of using raid 0 or other spanned type raid volumes unless you actually have more SSD raid arrays to write to. Since nothing else is able to read/write that fast then there very little to gain. Just more to loose because of the overhead of read/writes.

 

[Arlen10]

I forgot to mention I am setting up multiple SSD drives under one volume (either RAID 0 or Spanning). I want to backup to a HDD so I don't want to loose performance with RAID 1. ( my intentions are bit revised since posting this. originally was going to go with more SSDs as RAID 1 but that sounds too expensive compared to just timed backups)

With SSD there is pretty much no gain of using raid 0 or other spanned type raid volumes unless you actually have more SSD raid arrays to write to. Since nothing else is able to read/write that fast then there very little to gain. Just more to loose because of the overhead of read/writes.

That's very true. This system isn't for me specifically so let me think about this.