Raid 1 between 2 different capacity drives with a partition for the extra storage left over?

[Nickexp]

So, I've never done raid before but since I have 2 drives laying around I had a somewhat interesting idea I want to try that if it works would be pretty cool but mostly stupid.

I have a Seagate 500GB HDD and a Toshiba 640GB HDD from old laptops and I want to put them in raid but my understanding is in Raid 1 I will lose the 140GB the larger drive has. I was wondering if there is any way to have a raid array (or similar redundant setup) that allows for the extra 140GB to be partitioned into a separate drive within Windows.

Don't necessarily care about it being done strictly through Raid, just so long as my data is automatically backed up on both drives and prefrably show up as 1 drive within windows.

 

[finitekosmos]

It could be done, but I'm not sure I understand why you would do it. RAID 1 is not a backup solution, it's a redundancy solution and what I mean by that is that if you delete data from the drive its gone from both of them. If one drive fails you have a mirror copy of its data on the remaining drive (redundancy). I mean its even in the name RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks/Drives.

If you want a backup solution I'd look into an actual backup solution that keeps a copy of your important data on a storage medium of some type. Then when the worst happens (someone trashes your PC, a relative accidentally deletes your data) then you really will have a back up to draw from rather than a mirror copy of whatever has happened to the drive.

It's generally frowned upon to use disks of different sizes and types since it can impact the performance and capability of the Array. To be honest I'd simply look at an actual backup solution instead.

 

[derekullo]

Even if this did manage to access the excess data it would be self defeating.

The excess data on that drive would only be able to be accessed at the speed of that single drive and the data would not fault tolerant.

Data in the raid 1 is able to be read with both drives working together with writes still happening at the speed of one drive due to it writing the same thing to both drives ... mirror.

If you need more space then I would just invest in bigger drives.

Such as

WD - Red 1TB Internal SATA NAS Hard Drive for Desktops
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-red-1tb-internal-sata-nas-hard-drive-for-desktops/6520452.p?skuId=6520452

or larger as needed.

 

[derekullo]

If you have an old computer you can turn it into a backup computer using NAS4FREE.

NAS4FREE replaces Windows on that computer with an operating system designed for storing files.