Raid theory help

[totostoys]

so i'm a newbie to pc builds and toms hardware and was wondering if it is possible to raid 0+1 on different brands/sizes/build so that essentially i have the speed of a three way raid 0 and then have the raid 0 copy itself to a single hard drive. so essentially i have three main questions:

Firstly:
Can a raid work in conjunction with another raid?

Secondly:
Do all the hard drives involved in a RAID have to be the same model, size and/or type (eg ssd, hdd)?

Lastly:
If they don't have to be the same model, size and/or type, would i be able to set up 3x 128 gb ssd's that are exactly the same in raid 0 (to increase the performance) and then have that raid 0 in Raid 1 with a single (obviously large enough to support the 3 combined storage of the ssd's) HDD (or ssd if necessary) of a potentially different brand so that i have the contents of the raid 0 backed up onto a single hard drive (or ssd) that is not necessarily the same brand, size and type of hard disk.

Thanks.

 

[RealBeast]

If you are thinking about doing this with SSDs -- don't. Improved benchmarks will not give you a noticeable real world performance improvement.

While it is recommended to use the same model, size, and even firmware revision when building a RAID array, it is not required.

If you RAID two unequal size drives in RAID 0 you end up with an array twice the size of the smallest drive. If you mirror drives in RAID 1, you get only a mirror the size of the smaller drive or array.

Much of what you can do depends on the RAID controller that you are using. For example the Adaptec 6 series cards also supports RAID 1E where you can get by with only three disks instead of the 4 that are required by 10 -- what it does is stripe the data across all the disks and then also stripe a copy of the blocks moved over one disk, so if one of the three fails all data is still there. This is all academic though, none of it makes sense for a home user, especially with SSDs. If you want to see a graphic representation of this, look here: http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/_common/compatibility/_education/raid_level_compar_wp.htm

 

[totostoys]

Best answer selected by totostoys.

 

[ittimjones]

I'm pretty sure that the method that you theorized would require nested RAID controllers. You should learn about the different versions of RAID and choose the best of the options to use with 1 controller.