First time trying to setup RAID. Help?

[HumblePhenom]

Hey guys,

This is the first time trying this so bear with me if you can. I'm trying to setup RAID on my home computer, for the experience. I know that you need the same size drives to run RAID 5 I believe. I have a couple of disks I want to merge (one 500GB, and one 160 GB). Is there anyway to run RAID, on those two without losing most of my 500 GB hard drive. Is there a way to combine those drives to act as one? If so, please suggest what I should do.

Thank You all.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

only a good idea to run RAID on RAID supported drives, or your risking data loss. And you should also be using the same model and size. I believe you can RAID a 160 and 500, buy you will be limited to the capacity of the smallest drive, being the 160 gig.

 

[HumblePhenom]

Okay, thank you for the info.

 

[burns2608]

Hey guys,

This is the first time trying this so bear with me if you can. I'm trying to setup RAID on my home computer, for the experience. I know that you need the same size drives to run RAID 5 I believe. I have a couple of disks I want to merge (one 500GB, and one 160 GB). Is there anyway to run RAID, on those two without losing most of my 500 GB hard drive. Is there a way to combine those drives to act as one? If so, please suggest what I should do.

Thank You all.

JBOD : Just a Bunch Of Drives.
Not actually RAID, but some RAID controllers support this. In JBOD, 2 or more drives, which can be of any size, are put together so it appear as a single drive whose capacity is the sum of the individual drives. Since JBOD provides no performance increase and reduced data security, it is seldomly used.

 

[Railgun1369]

RAID supported drive? Such as?

Any drive that can have data written to/from it can be used in an array. There's nothing that says a drive has to explicitly support use in a RAID.

You can use 200 MB Connor HDs if you want, but, of course, being as old as they are, you run a much greater risk of data loss.

But yes, you can setup a JBOD. You don't get any performance or redundancy as mentioned above.