6 HDD - best way to configure and setup

[CalifLove]

Hello all,

I am seeking advice on two things in particular

My current setup is 2 WD Cavier Green 640GB Drives in Raid 0 running from an Asus P5Q mobo from the onboard Intel RAID controller (I believe the model is ICHR10? ).

I have 4 additional new WD Black 640gb drives that I have not setup yet.

Initially, my idea was to setup the new 4 Black drives in RAID 5 and then copy my data from the old 2 drive array to the new and add those older 2 drives to the RAID 5 setup. I now understand that this is not a viable option as the Intel controller does not support live space expansion.

My next idea is to do the same, but keep the older 2 'green' drives and use them purely for backup as needed.

Heres question 1 - can I setup the new 4 drives in RAID 5 and keep the existing RAID 0 setup so that I can copy my existing data over?

Question 2 - What is the recomended method of copying the data on my existing drives to the new drives? I have Norton Ghost on my machine but I am unsure if that will work?


Any help is much appreciated!

 

[jfurterer]

If you have an external drive that is large enough to hold the contents of your current array I'd copy over to that, wipe the old drives and install all 6 in a new array. This would be the ideal as the more drives you have in a RAID 5 less is the hit to lost storage to parity.

However if that's not an option you'll have to see if your integrated controller can support multiple RAID arrays. I'm guess that it doesn't. Most Intel integrated controllers turn all the SATA ports into an array or none of them; but an easy way to test is to put in the new drives and see if you can get a second array set up. If that works whatever transfer solution you have go with. It's going to take a long time either way.

Again I'd recommend picking up an external 1TB drive or some other solution to transfer the files off the RAID 0 array and then set up a new array with all the drives.