Setting up hard drives with RAID?

[MellowFellow]

Asking the community gurus this question so i can save myself a lot of time and headache. I'm wondering would be the most logical way to set all of these drives up in my new system.

I'm going to be getting a 250GB SSD to put my os on. I also will have a larger hdd for games and have several other hdd drives i have lying around that i want to use to store backups, important files, etc that i'm thinking about putting in a RAID setup of some sort. I may or may not use all of these, but here they are.

other drives:
1TB HDD - currently main drive
4TB HDD
2x 250GB HDD's
2x 80GB HDD's - currently in dells, will probably leave where they are
320GB laptop 2.5 HDD - in an old laptop that i may cannibalize for parts

 

[TbsToy]

If you RAID drives of different sizes the array will only be as big as the smallest drive xs the # of drives. In W 10 there is something called storage spaces and you can combine drives for the total volume of various drives.
W.P.

 

[Solandri]

RAID is not a backup. If you accidentally delete or overwrite a file on a RAID array, that file is gone from all the drives. You would need to restore it from an external backup. So you still need a backup even if you have RAID.

RAID is for reliability (uptime). A drive can die and the system will keep chugging along without crashing. Your system will not go down - you can continue to use it during the time it takes for you to get a replacement drive. A company which would lose millions of dollars a day if their file server goes down wants that file server on RAID. A personal computer? Probably not.

If you just want to use the extra capacity of all those old drives, you want something called JBOD - just a bunch of disks. That'll glom all the drives together and make the computer think it's one big drive. Reliability will be low though (if a disk dies, any files on it are gone). And I'm really not sure it's worth trying to salvage 80GB and 250 GB HDDs this way. HDDs cost about $25/TB now, so the combined capacity of those 4 drives is only worth about $16.

If you had reasonably large older drives - say 500-750 GB - I'd recommend an external RAID enclosure which could JBOD them together into 2-3 TB of storage. Then you could use that as your backup "drive". But for disks this small, either keep them for posterity, to repair really old systems which can't take bigger drives, or let your kids take them apart so they can learn what the inside of a HDD looks like.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Setting up two identical dives in RAID 0 is good for:

a) getting your name on web site leader boards for benchmark performance
b) Increasing the performance of your system in very specialized server or workstation applications.

Setting up two identical dives in RAID 1 is good for:

a) providing instantaneous backup of files on a second drive.

None of the uses you have described will benefit in any way from a RAID setup.

1. The two ancient 80GB drives are of no value in a modern system. They would be extremely slow and would have trouble storing more than 1 one of today's recent AAA games.

2. The 320 GB drive is also old and rather slow by today's standards. It would serve well for off-site storage of important files.

3. 3 and 4TB drives have a rather high failure rate so best to have something available to back up this data to.

4. The two 250GB drives are again small and very slow by today's standards.

5. Because of the age and slow speed of these drives, combining them into any type of linked storage would slow your computer down considerably.

RAID simply brings nothing to the table here. RAID 0 brings nothing to the table in any desktop application outside things like video editing and specialized work station apps. RAID 1 is habndy in a sense for immediate backup of files, but again, on the desktop, you can accomplish the same goal with a simple freeware backup program Like FBackup.

Best bet would be a Thermaltake BlacX HD caddy, which you could use for all the old drives to store things on and then take off site. A backup on the same machine is of little value if there is a fire.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=blacx&N=-1&isNodeId=1

 

[MellowFellow]

Would the 2 slower 250gb hdd's slow down the new SSD if they are all in a raid5? Is raid even necessary for normal computing? I'm thinking that using on of the drives for an external back up would suit my needs better.

I already have a external enclosure for a 3.5 drive that i can use. And i'll most likely use the 4tb to store movies, games, and other media that can easily be re-downloaded if the large drive does fail.