Raid Drives

[c911darkwolf]

So i'm fixing to dabble in Raiding my drives. I have two 500gig 7200rpm drives and i plan to stripe them. I dont really have anything valuable on my drives so the there is not a concern for data loss if the whole thing goes up in flames (one drive failing)

My mobo is setup to handle raid.

My question is this..


I run 2-3 virtual machines when doing HW, Play wow, and i do the folding at home.


Will i see much of a improvement?

Second queestion

if you have 3 500gig hard drives, can you Stripe 2 and Mirror the 3rd? i know the stripe mirror combo works, but i wondered if it would work if the mirror drive is smaller? i never plan to have 500gigs of info n my hard drive i usually stay around 100 to 200.

 

[WyomingKnott]

I can answer the second question: No. The minimum number of disks for RAID 1+0 (mirrored stripe set) is 4.

In a true RAID 1+0, the mirroring and striping is done on a block level. So you would be mirroring one of your RAID0 disks but not the other.

The closest that you could come to doing what you describe is using some sort of driver-level write duplicator like MirrorFolder to mirror the RAID0 set, as a single source volume, to the other drive. Performance would be terrible, limited by the speed of the single mirror drive, and when it ran out of room things would break even though you had 500 gig free on the RAID0 volume.