Setting Up A JBOD - work around ?s

[pixelmxr]

i have a new Xcellon DRD501 and 3 new Seagate 2TB drives that I got for free (God Is Good, ALL the Time). I also have a 3TB & 1.5 TB drive that have data on them that I want to place in the Xcellon that I am running under WIN 7 PR w/12 GIGs of RAM. I have a few questions of clarification.

1. I learned (the hard way) that in a RAID setup the drives have to be the same dive or you loose all the data on the larger drive. Is that the same in a JBOD setup?
2. Do you HAVE to setup a RAID when you setup your drives in a box like this?
3. Is a JBOD an actual "raid" or is it TRULY, just a bunch of disc?
4. If it IS a raid, can I raid 3 disc and simply use the housing to safely store the other drives to access the data?
5. Does it matter that my compute has a RAID 0 setup w/4 250GB drives internally?
6. IF I am able to create a JBOD will my system see the individual drives?

I REALLY don't want to deal with trying to move all the data that's on the other drives in the process of creating a raid array of the new & existing drives. I'm doing this in the hopes of getting ride of the sea of USB cables & power adapters connected to my system.

 

[KalTorak]

You should be able to retrieve the data from the other disks if one fails using JBOD.
JBOD is not a true RAID, it gives you no redundancy or speed advantages.
It wont matter that you already have a Raid 0 setup.
if you setup a JBOD the system shouldnt see the individual disks, but will see what ever partitions you use.

I would avoid a JBOD, and would likely RAID 5 the 3X Seagates. And if your enclosure allows use the 3Tb and 1.5Tb as seperate drives.

 

[pixelmxr]

Thanks Kaltorak...
I setup the box as a raid 5 and didn't like what I saw, a lot of small partitions so I simplified everything and got what I was looking for. I now have a single house w/5 drives + 2 additional externals vs the stack of mess I had w/cords & adapters running everywhere. Was not too concerned about redundancy but most concerned about capacity. I have 12GIGs of RAM and use BACKBLAZE for backup which is GREAT!

 

[KalTorak]

A touch different to my approach then. Lol

My nas is 3X3Tb WD Reds in RaidZ (software raid) it works beautifully, but that is my backup server and my PC still has 4 seperate disks. I have that large ammount of small partitions (small being 500Gb minimum) on my PC rather than the NAS. Lol

Glad you got it all working!

 

[pixelmxr]

don't know what happened but NOW I can't see anything!
I shut down my computer and moved the Xcellon and plugged it back in and only 1 light comes one.. AAAAAAAHJHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!