How would and can I setup a 4 500gb hard drive raid setup

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J

J doggy dog

Commendable
May 15, 2016
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The title says it all can and how would I setup four 500gd hard drives in a raid setup I'll tell you what raid card I'm using and what hard drives I am to if you want.
 
Solution
ingtar33
i'm going to assume no OS or OS drive, but this doesn't change much even with an OS installed on a seperate drive.

1) installed the 4 drives
2) connect them via SATA or SAS cables to the motherboard/RAID card
3) power on your pc
4) enter your computer's bios
5) change all 4 drives from ACHI or IDE to RAID (some bios group RAID with ACHI, for an ACHI/RAID option, those bios usually have a "RAID management option elsewhere you'll need to turn on in order to be able to set up the RAID in the following steps, the ones with only a RAID setting, usually don't have a RAID management option switch in the bios; you might need to play around a bit depending on your motherboard to continue following these instructions)
6) TURN OFF FAST BOOT
7)...
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ingtar33

ingtar33

Glorious
Dec 17, 2012
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i'm going to assume no OS or OS drive, but this doesn't change much even with an OS installed on a seperate drive.

1) installed the 4 drives
2) connect them via SATA or SAS cables to the motherboard/RAID card
3) power on your pc
4) enter your computer's bios
5) change all 4 drives from ACHI or IDE to RAID (some bios group RAID with ACHI, for an ACHI/RAID option, those bios usually have a "RAID management option elsewhere you'll need to turn on in order to be able to set up the RAID in the following steps, the ones with only a RAID setting, usually don't have a RAID management option switch in the bios; you might need to play around a bit depending on your motherboard to continue following these instructions)
6) TURN OFF FAST BOOT
7) save settings and exit the bios
8) reboot pc
9) the RAID bios will load and prompt you to hit a button to configure the RAID (it might flash this quickly, so keep your eyes open, and fingers ready, not sure what button it will be, probably one of the F keys. you might need to reboot if you miss the window)
10) inside the RAID controller setup, you'll have the options of what type of raid you want to create as well as what drives to include in it; with 4 drives I suggest RAID 5 or 6
11) save settings and exit
12) if no OS, you can now attempt to install one. HOWEVER the OS likely won't detect your RAID setup, you will need to load RAID drivers for your RAID controller in order to select the RAID drive as the destination for the OS install.
13) if you did this with an OS already installed on a separate drive (you can't do this with the OS already installed on a drive in the new RAID without reformating that drive and needing to reinstall the OS; you should be able in windows for example, to simply add the new RAID drive as a drive available to your OS through "create and format hard drive partitions" application.
 
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Solution
ingtar33

ingtar33

Glorious
Dec 17, 2012
9,017
198
45,840


with RAID 6 you'll get 1 TB data storage
with RAID 5 you'll get 1.5 TB data storage

perhaps if i explain the benefits/differences

RAID 0 => is not really RAID at all, this basically drive stripping, designed to multiple read/write speeds by the number of drives used. There is no redundancies in a RAID 0, when one drive fails the whole raid fails and is unrecoverable.

RAID 1 => this is a basic RAID, where one drive is basically mirrored onto a second drive. This does not improve write times. But if one drive fails the other drive will be able to step in automatically, and there will be no obvious change in performance

RAID 5 => This is a type of RAID which provides the security of RAID 1, AND some performance increases as well. How this RAID works is it writes all data onto 2 drives simultaneously, but it splits the data in a way that no 1 drive is ever able to take down the raid if it fails. you need a min of 3 drives to form a RAID5 setup, and the size of the RAID is always (size of the drives * (number of drives -1)), so in your setup we'd have a final RAID setup of 1.5TB. This type of RAID requires 2 drives to fail at the same time to kill the RAID. It also increases the speed of the write speeds by number of drives -1

RAID 6 => this type of RAID is designed to add extra redundancy to a RAID 5 and is advised for RAIDs form by individual disks 2TB or larger. this type of RAID is a little slower then RAID5, but where RAID 5 can function fine with 1 failed drive, RAID 6 can function with 2 failed drives. the size of this drive and the write speeds are limited by the (number of drives -2) * speed/size

RAID10 or RAID 1+0 => this type of RAID is basically type 0 mixed with type 1, you get 1/2 the drive space of the combined drives, you NEED a min of 4 drives for it, and the WRITE speed is no better then RAID 6. Overall I'd take RAID 5 over RAID 10 every day of the week, and RAID 6 over RAID 10 in large drives as well. not a fan of this setup, rarely see it in servers, usually only see it in gaming setups by people who don't get RAID 5 or 6.

 
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J

J doggy dog

Commendable
May 15, 2016
42
0
1,530
Sure I want the advantages of the RAIDs and my cousin let me raid his supply of hard drives servers I got 24gb of ram and two really good xeons and I just said f*** it and I'm using RAID
 
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