RAID Configuration that starts on one drive and moves to the next when it is full.

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Cpone

Commendable
May 11, 2016
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I'm looking for a RAID configuration that rather than stripes the data across the two drives it starts using the first hard drive and when that one is full it moves onto the next hard drive. I'm also wondering if this would reduce data loss if one of the drives fail as the data isn't chopped up as much between the two drives.
 
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Mr Kagouris
There's no such configuration. You can create a "volume" between two or more drives (it's like a multi-drive partition), but if one drive fails you still lose everything. You can either just write your data on the separate drives manually, or if the drives are the same you can set up RAID 0 between them to get better transfer speeds (HDD RAID 0 is much less volatile than SSD RAID).
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Mr Kagouris

Mr Kagouris

Judicious
Sep 7, 2015
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There's no such configuration. You can create a "volume" between two or more drives (it's like a multi-drive partition), but if one drive fails you still lose everything. You can either just write your data on the separate drives manually, or if the drives are the same you can set up RAID 0 between them to get better transfer speeds (HDD RAID 0 is much less volatile than SSD RAID).
 
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Solution
SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

Glorious
Jul 30, 2014
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Welcome to the community, Cpone!

@Mr Kagouris is right! Moreover, you should keep in mind that HDDs are pretty sensitive hardware components! This is exactly why we recommend regular backups of your data and more than one copy of it in several storage devices. This is the surest way to avoid potential data loss. Storage that is configured in an RAID array is also not a backup solution, despite the fact that it uses multiple drives.
I'd advise you to read through this wiki about RAID arrays and get to know more about your RAID options. You should always have a clear purpose when configuring Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Regardless of the storage configuration itself, you should always keep off-site backups of your files.

Hope this was helpful. Keep us posted if you have more questions! :)
SuperSoph_WD
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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It's not RAID per se, but that's pretty much how JBOD (just a bunch of disks) works. It'll glom a bunch of drives together to make it seem like a single volume. If a drive fails, you can usually (well, twice in my experience*) access the files on the remaining drives by mounting them separately. So (at least for the implementations I've used) it just seems to be a transparent merging of a regular filesystem. And from watching the drive activity lights on my RAID enclosure, it starts writing to one disk until it's full, the goes on to the next disk.

Not sure it would give me any more peace of mind than RAID 0. Murphy's law says that one important file that you absolutely must have will be on the disk that failed. Just keep a full backup and don't worry about the ways your RAID array could die.

* (The drives didn't actually fail. I was replacing the drives in the enclosure with newer bigger ones, so I played around a bit with pulling them out to simulate a failure. Stuck the pulled drive into a computer, and whaddaya know the files are readable.)
 
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