Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > 3 Seagate 500 gig HDD's
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vertigo_2000   06-13-2007 at 09:08:31 PM

I was thinking about purchasing 3 of these and setting them up in RAID.

I'm not sure I completely understand how this will work.

I want 2 HD's for RAID 0 (fast read/write) and the 3rd as a backup in case one of those fails (RAID 1).

Can that be done?

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sturm   06-13-2007 at 09:20:15 PM
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Its called raid 5. 3 disk minimum. 2 drives are striped the 3rd drive is for parity. No data loss if one drive fails.

to do what you want: stripped pair with full backup you will need 4 500gb drives.
2 stripped 500gb drives will been seen as a 1TB drive so you will need 2 more 500Gb drives to back it up.

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vertigo_2000   06-13-2007 at 09:26:26 PM
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I only need 500 GB of storage. So I guess I want RAID 5. I suppose I need a separate controller for that. Can you recommend one?

I'll be purchasing an Asus P5K Deluxe MB. I believe it only supports RAID 0 and 1.

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ausch30   06-13-2007 at 09:55:01 PM
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most newer chipsets support raid 5 so there is no need for a ad on card. I have 3 500gb drives in a raid 5 using my onboard controller. These are the specs for the board your looking at:

Southbridge
- 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports
- Supports RAID 0 and 1
JMicron® JMB363 PATA and SATA controller
- 1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices
- 2 x External SATA 3.0 Gb/s port (SATA On-the-Go)
- Supports SATA RAID 0,1 and JBOD

Here is a good Raid 5 controller.

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kamel5547   06-13-2007 at 10:12:30 PM
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Quote :

most newer chipsets support raid 5 so there is no need for a ad on card.



Software RAID = bad

MoBo based RAID is software RAID, and for several reasons is not a good idea. Its cheaper though...

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/per [...] are-c.html

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ausch30   06-13-2007 at 10:15:51 PM
- 0 +

Quote :

Software RAID = bad



I agree that it's not as good as a dedicated Raid card but it is an option.

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darkstar782   06-13-2007 at 10:22:51 PM
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If you only want 500GB of storage, use RAID1.

RAID5 is a bad idea without a hardware XOR controller, which you don't have. It would just make the drives slow.

There is no need for 3 disks for this. RAID1 will improve read times, but not write times. If you want all the performance of RAID0 with the reliability of RAID1, you need 4 disks and RAID1/0

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vertigo_2000   06-13-2007 at 10:35:05 PM
- 0 +

Gotcha... if I only want 500 GB of storage, I only need 2 HD's and need to set the MB to RAID 1.

I can still partition afterwards, correct?

Also... I've never built my own system before, so I have some questions.

The link above said the operating system has to be off the RAID array... how the heck do I do that?

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