2xSSD, 2xHDD, one larger HDD... Which RAID?

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enlightedL16

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Jan 18, 2016
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I asked for an SSD drive for Christmas. I got 2, exactly the same SSD (240gb) drives. So, I currently have 2 (2TB) HDD drives running RAID1, plus a third (3TB) HDD with copies of photos, taxes, music.
So, can I run 2 SSD and the 2 HDD as RAID1+0. My thought would be operating system on the SSD, data on the HDD.... But can this be done? And have the 3tb drive as it is, for copies of important files.
Is there a better way to use these 5 drives?

2x 240gb SSD
2x 2TB HDD
1x 3TB HDD
 
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SuperSoph_WD
Welcome, enlightedL16!

Quite the configuration you got there! Pretty good job! :) I'd recommend you to consider using the 3 TB HDD as a backup drive put in an enclosure and used only for backups of your RAID configurations. Even though you have your 2 x 2TB HDDs in RAID 1, this doesn't make raid arrays a backup solution. Better be safe than sorry, right?
Other than that, you should be able to keep your mechanical hard drives in RAID 1 and set up a RAID 0 array separately with the SSDs.
However, it's not recommended to combine the RAIDs. If they were configured in one array all 4 drives would be limited to the SSD capacity and the HDD speed which overall bottlenecks the system.
You'd probably want to boot from the RAID 0 SSDs, so...
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Welcome, enlightedL16!

Quite the configuration you got there! Pretty good job! :) I'd recommend you to consider using the 3 TB HDD as a backup drive put in an enclosure and used only for backups of your RAID configurations. Even though you have your 2 x 2TB HDDs in RAID 1, this doesn't make raid arrays a backup solution. Better be safe than sorry, right?
Other than that, you should be able to keep your mechanical hard drives in RAID 1 and set up a RAID 0 array separately with the SSDs.
However, it's not recommended to combine the RAIDs. If they were configured in one array all 4 drives would be limited to the SSD capacity and the HDD speed which overall bottlenecks the system.
You'd probably want to boot from the RAID 0 SSDs, so you'd need to unplug all other drives when installing Windows on them, otherwise, you'd encounter an OS confusion that would require you to re-format everything.

The most important thing you need to remember is that RAID 0 has no redundancy, so if one of the SSD fails, you'd lose all the data stored there.
The RAID 1 does give some peace of mind regarding your data, however, it's not a backup solution when the drives are configured inside the system. You never know what might happen to that system, so there's always a probability you could lose everything. That's why it's best to have the 3 TB HDD setup externally (off-site) and keep a copy of all the data from the system backed up to it.

I hope I was helpful. Keep me posted if you have more questions! :)
SuperSoph_WD
 
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