need help with raid wd reds

[Bombular]

I have two wd 1tb red drives that both have stuff on them like program files and such and I would like to raid them together into a storage drive of 2tb. I have a 2tb external hdd that i could use for backing it up before doing this. Does anyone know the most efficient way to do this? thanks

 

[middlemarkal]

transfer your data to the external HD
then go in the BIOS et change the SATA for RAID
then reboot and partition, format the new RAID disk

 

[Bombular]

transfer your data to the external HD
then go in the BIOS et change the SATA for RAID
then reboot and partition, format the new RAID disk

what raid should i use?
is there a way to add more hdds once the raid is made?

 

[blasc]

every time you make the change to RAID, it formats the drives that are to be used.

So if you later want to add a new drive to the RAID system, everything is lost (from the ones you previously had and also the new), so you have to backup first.

RAID0 -> all drives "transform" into 1 (with all space available. 2x500GB = 1TB), and the read/write access is much faster. The data is scattered through all the drives, so if 1 of the drives dies, you lose everything.

RAID1 -> basically you have 2 HDD drives of 500GB (example). with this RAID, the system only "sees" 1 (if you go to My Computer, there is only 1 drive with 500GB). This is because this RAID is for data protection, both HDD will be the mirror of one another, i.e., when writing, it replicates the data to both drives, identically. If one drive dies, you still have the info on the other. Small performance improvement.


Edit: RAID explained fast fast fast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE7Bfw9lFfs