What would you do with these 3 HDD

[jeffon]

I have 2 250GB SATA Hitachi deskstars HDD's and one 500GB SATA Hitachi deskstar HDD. How would you configure your system? One giant array?

Thanks

-Jeffon

 

[dmacfour]

wow.. thats alot of space.. I have trouble filling up my 280GB HDD

 

[jt001]

I personally would RAID 0 the 2x250GB drives and use the 500GB as storage/ backup.

 

[eRazor]

I've had some trouble with disk crashes lately (5 year and one month old Maxtor 250GB's) so I'd be inclined to set up the 250's as a RAID 1 (mirrored set) as the boot drive and leave the 500 as a data disk. I really hate losing my boot partition. I have so many utilities and applications that I use almost daily that it takes me a full day to get the system up where it's usable. After that I spend a week figuring out piece by piece what's missing (as I run into them).

But then again, you really only have 4 choices.

1) run each drive as standalone
2) run the 250's in RAID 0 (striped 500GB) and the 500 standalone
3) run the 250's in RAID 1 (mirrored 250GB) and the 500 standalone
4) run a (there's a number for it, but it's not really RAID) JBOD configuration with all 3 drives (1TB).

I wouldn't even consider 4. One bad byte and you lose everything.

If you really need performance and space, then 2 is a good option, but you have no redundancy and risk losing stuff without good backups.

If you don't need the space, but want data redundancy, then 3 is the way to go. If one drive fails, you have the other to rebuild the array from.

Now, if it were me, I'd find a way to get another one of those 250's and run those three in a RAID 5 configuration (Striped with shared parity). You get the best of both worlds there. Speed from the striping and redundancy from the parity.

 

[jeffon]

If I stripe the two 250GB drives and use the 500GB drive as a standalone for storage and backup then...

- I run Norton Ghost and could store an image of each virtual drive. This would allow me easy recovery from a failure. Any flaw in my logic?

The only issue then would be how big a C partition to make for Windows. Hmm.. how bloated can Windows possibly get?

-Jeffon

 

[technology-sponge]

the 250's in a striped raid for the system partition

and the 500gig for storage

 

[jt001]

Assuming you're running Windows, you could just set Windows backup/Norton to backup however much you feel necessary. I have it do a weekly backup of the boot files, and a daily backup of documents. RAID alone is still no substite for backups(file systems can still go screwy with raid, files get accidentally deleted etc) Anyway, put a 4GB partition at the beginning of the disk for the pagefile(that part has the best seek times so it's best suited for a pagefile), whatever you think you'll need for the Windows partition add 20GB or so to be safe, partition the rest for stroage.