Raid Servers Setup

[IInuyasha74]

I have a good bit of storage in my desktop. I currently have two 2TB HDDs and I am just about to get a 3TB HDD to add to the system. I have around 2300GB used. That being said, I was curious about the idea of setting up the drives in some sort of RAID formation. I have done a little reading on RAID before but my understanding isn't the best for them.

My questions are as follows:

1. Can I use the 3TB HDD to be a RAID of both other drives since the total size used on them is less than 3TB?

2. Does RAID work between partitions? For example, if I made a 2TB and 1TB partition on the 3TB HDD, could it then work as a RAID for a 2TB HDD and a 1TB partition on the other HDD?

3. Would it be better to do a RAID between the two 2TB HDDs?

4. Can a RAID server be simply disengaged leaving both drives fully functional and able to be altered without effecting the other?

5. What type of RAID server would be best for what I am trying to do?

I am only curious in this for keeping the data secure encase of a drive failure. Any help and information would be greatly appreciated.

 

[noidea_77]

1. No
2. No
3. a RAID1 would work
4. Well, only in raid1 and only if you are a raid expert, but generally no.
5 raid1

 

[das_stig]

Don't get the 3Tb, get a couple of 2Tb and then raid-10 all 4 drives.

 

[popatim]

raid 10 would leave him with no more space than he has now... which is 4tb total.

Not that I am recommending any raid at this point but a four 2tb drive raid5 would would give 6tb of space with redundancy to survive 1 drive failing.

@OP
What is the goal you are trying to achieve?
What is your current backup system?
Are you willing to purchase additional drives aand or hardware to meet you goal and if so whats your budget?
What is your current system specs please?

 

[das_stig]

OP did not specify if he prefered speed over safety, so played for safety.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Thank you for the posts everyone. The idea of having four 2TB HDDs to use in Raid 10 or 5 sounds great but unfortunately I don't have the ability to get the additional needed drives at the moment. I buy my drives cheap and I am getting my 3TB for only $75 which is cheaper than I can buy a 2TB most of the time.

Just out of curiosity, not because I will be able to use it, how does RAID 5 work? To be able to let me have 6TB and no matter what have a back up sounds truly amazing.

Back to what I am actually wanting to do though, I currently have absolutely no backup for my drives. If one is about to die my hope is that it will first become unformatted needing reformatted, and then after to recover the data with data recovery tools hoping to retrieve everything and move it to separate drives before the bad drive completely fails. Obviously this is a terrible back up method.

I wanted to divide the 3TB into two partitions so that it could be a backup drive for most of the other two drives, but as noidea pointed out, that isn't possible. So my next plan is to for the time being move all of my most valued data to one of the two 2TB hard drives and use the second 2TB Hard drive to mirror it. That leaves about half a terabyte of my data unsecured, but better than all of it. Does everyone agree RAID 1 is still my best choice?

As for my system Specs:
Intel i3-3225 Ivy Bridge CPU 3.5GHz
Asrock Z77 Extreme4-M Motherboard
Avexir 4x4GB DDR3 RAM @1634 9-10-9-24-1T
AMD Radeon HD 7850

OCZ 60GB SSD - C: Drive
Maxtor 200GB HDD - D: Programs, just for programs too big for C: Drive
Samsung HD204UI - 2TB HDD
Western Digital WD20EZRX - 2TB HDD
Western Digital WD30EZRX - 3TB HDD

 

[popatim]

Ok I think I understand. Though you cannot raid you can still split the 3tb into two 1.5tb partitions. Then you can backup the 2tb drives to the 1.5tb partitions provided you have room. This is a better backup plan then raid.

Remember it is not a backup if only 1 device has a copy of the file. backups need multiple copies on multiple devices and the more devices the better backed up you are.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Hmm I guess that is true and I could just copy all the data. Alright I will just keep it simple and do that.