Best configuration with equipment on hand?

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bg4m3r

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Oct 7, 2013
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My system is currently set up with 2 7200 320GB HDD in a RAID0 and a 5600 1TB HDD for backups. I've recently acquired two 7200 360GB HDD. I have not tested these new drives yet, but assuming they are of acceptable condition (which they should be), what would be the best RAID configuration for these drives? I was thinking of adding the new drives to set up a RAID 0+1 array, and keeping the TB for backup storage. Also, what would be the best process for to implementing the new setup. On a side note, they are all Seagate drives, so I have been using Seagate DiscWizard for creating full monthly backups and Windows Backup for weekly personal data backups.
 
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popatim
Creating a raid 10 would only gain you redundancy and no additional space or performance. If you want to create a raid10 its far from being a bad idea. Your other choices would be a second raid0, a larger 4drive raid0, or a 4 drive raid5 (which would probably be slow on a cheap raid card or motherbd raid)

If you've never tested restoring your backup I suggest you disconnect both 320's and install the 360's as a raid 0 and try to restore to them. If that goes well and is bootable then you know your backup strategy is fine. If it doesn't then you've been wasting your time. If you have problems just re-install the 320's where they were and it should boot right back off of those.
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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Creating a raid 10 would only gain you redundancy and no additional space or performance. If you want to create a raid10 its far from being a bad idea. Your other choices would be a second raid0, a larger 4drive raid0, or a 4 drive raid5 (which would probably be slow on a cheap raid card or motherbd raid)

If you've never tested restoring your backup I suggest you disconnect both 320's and install the 360's as a raid 0 and try to restore to them. If that goes well and is bootable then you know your backup strategy is fine. If it doesn't then you've been wasting your time. If you have problems just re-install the 320's where they were and it should boot right back off of those.
 
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bg4m3r

Honorable
Oct 7, 2013
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10,510
I have not tested my backups, but will certainly do so before messing with things. Thanks for the hint. :) I am using the onboard RAID controller, my MoBo is an ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3. It wasn't expensive, but the RAID0 I currently have setup is giving me 111MB/s throughput, which seems pretty respectable to me. I am looking for redundancy primarily, I just wasn't sure what would give me the best balance between performance and data integrity.
 
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bg4m3r

Honorable
Oct 7, 2013
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10,510
Tried to set up a RAID10 today. Tested my backup and it restored to the new drives fine. However, when I set up the 10 configuration, it refused to restore. Either the boot disk wouldn't see the RAID correctly, or it would fail to write. Tried booting off a boot disk, and tried installing Windows to the TB drive and restoring to the RAID from there. All fail. Any advice on this would be great. I'm currently going back to the original RAID 0 configuration for now. At least I didn't lose any data.
 
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