karash5050

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Nov 16, 2011
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Hello

I am upgrading my system and I have limited experience with RAID setups. The first time I used it was building a RAID 0 with 2 250GB Western Digital drives which ended in failure - One of them apparently crashed and I was unable to boot so I tore it down and moved on.

I am curious: Is it possible to create a RAID array using striping on 2 drives and then mirroring with a 3rd identical HDD?

Example: I want to use two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB/32MB Cache drives and stripe them (totalling 1TB storage) but then mirror them onto separate 1TB drive for backup. I believe this is called RAID 3? That's according to Wikipedia and the FAQ located here but I am uncertain if my motherboard supports it, or if it is even recommended?

The end goal is to have 1TB of striped and mirrored storage connected with an OCZ Synapse Cache 64GB in order to achieve extremely fast loads across my most used data (mostly games) but having the security of all my data mirrored... I hope I am not confusing anyone!

Current system: EVGA X58 SLI (E758-A1 with latest version of bios, BIOS 83) w/ Core i7 920 & 6GB ram, Windows 7 64bit Home Premium
 

karash5050

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Nov 16, 2011
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Well it would appear that RAID 5 is the closest (and I guess best) thing I can do with my board, but it requires 4 drives. Is anyone aware of additional options? I'd prefer not to drop $600+ on 4 of those F3 drives.