couple hdd/raid questions...

[IFMU]

ok, here's the situation.

i have 4 sata and 1 ide port on my board.
1 is taken for my ssd and 1 for my blu ray burner, so that leaves me 2 sata and 1 ide ports open.
now, i have
1 x 320gig 7200rpm (sata)
1 x 320gig 5400rpm (sata)
1 x 160gig 5400rpm (sata)
1 x 80gig 7200rpm (ide)
1 x 36gig raptor (sata)

I want to combine the drives to create the largest partition i can get. speed isn't absolutely mandatory, but i can't allow it to be slow either.
i was thinking of doing a few different things to get the largest partition i can get, without it causing lag etc.

i have an ide to sata adapter here that could be used to alter the onboard ide to sata, to be able to add in an additional drive, but it would slow the sata drives down correct? how bad?

my primary thought is to take the 2 x 320gig drives and either raid 0 them, for a "640" partition and call it good. but if possible, would it be feasible to add in the 160gig using the sata/ide adapter and raid 0, or the equivalent of all 3 drives?

i've been running the 320 and 80gigs separate up until now, but am tired of trying to keep track what is where, etc.

any suggestions on the best way to run the drives would be appreciated.

tia

[saint-francis]

FlexRAID?

[IFMU]

thanks for the reply saint-francis, but what's flexraid?

it's not looking like i'm going to get much in replies, but may as well update just in case someone bothers to reply.

i've had the chance to check my parts out more. the board does not have onboard raid. so anything i do, would have to be done using windows. expand the drive to use more than one etc.

elsewhere someone mentioned that using 2 different drive speeds could cause possible problems. how risky is it to mix drive speeds? what's the risk? i.e. rough % of data getting corrupted, drives being mixed into a single partition erroring and loosing the info....

[chuchnit]

Your best bet is either windows soft-RAID 0 with the 320GB drives or make it JBOD. That's your only option really if you want the largest partition.

[saint-francis]

FlexRAID will make all of your drives appear as one drive. And if you desire it gives you the ability to designate one or more drives for parity for RAID 5 - 6 like fault tolerance. You can also use any size drives you like. Mix and match. It doesn't however give any performance increase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRAID

[IFMU]

yea the softraid is what i was thinking about giving a try.
i'll check out that flexraid some and see how well it would work over the default windows disk expansion.

what size drive would be required to be able to give it any fault tolerance? would a 160 work ok?

[saint-francis]

For a parity drive you need one that is at least as large as your largest drive. But remember, you don't need to use the parity functionality. You could just use it to pool your drives.

[IFMU]

, you don't need to use the parity functionality. You could just use it to pool your drives.

not sure i understand what you mean by that?

For a parity drive you need one that is at least as large as your largest drive.

that makes it not an option for me unfortunately.

mind still answering the 1st question there though?

[saint-francis]

Sure!

FlexRAID has two distinct functions which operate independently of each other: RAID like parity generation and drive pooling. You can use one or both. So for example, you could keep the way all of your drives appear as independent lettered entities but also have one or more designated drives exclusively for parity. If you loose a drive you can rebuild the contents from the parity drive. There is also the pooling. You can have 100 drives which all appear as a single drive. If you want to protect them from data loss in case of failure you could add one or more drives and designate them for parity..... but you don't have to. You could just use the drive pool function and make all of your drives appear as one big drive. It sounds to me exactly like what you need. There are apparently some drive pooling utilities out there trying to fill the hole left when MS ditched DE with WHS 2011 and at least one of them can work on any Windows OS. They also offer the ability to duplicate your data like DE in WHS V1 does but it doesn't sound like you're looking for that. hey also cost money, or at least will when they come out of beta. FlexRAID is used my many many people and has been for a while. You won't be asking anything complicated of it so I don't see why you would have any problems. Well, the only problem you'd have is that the site seems to be down right now for some reason so you might not be able to download it for a couple days.

[Computurd]

i would like to extend a note of caution here though: IMFU all softraid solutions, bar none, do have a terrible tendency to throw arrays very easily. Since this is an overclocking forum where BSOD is a daily occurrence for some (believe me ) when overclocking it is not a good idea.
the only reason i mention it is that you are doubly at risk using an extended drive. you have zero fault tolerance. even with a parity disk, you only have *limited* protection, all you have to do is lose metadata on said disk, and your effectively screwed.

for a 24/7 rig though it would be fine i guess.

EDIT: personally i wouldnt do it, but many do with fine results. i may just be paranoid, but any system should have an extended set of backup procedures in place regardless. as long as all data is duplicated on *separate* media you have nothing to worry about.

[johnw]

That is not an issue with snapshot RAID like FlexRAID.

[saint-francis]

@ Compouturd, I'm not even sure what you're getting at. It doesn't seem like he's even really interested in data protection at all since he was talking about RAID 0. Do you mean to say that with FlexRAID if he looses a drive he looses everything just like in RAID 0? Because that's not the case. You only loose the data on that particular drive. And if you use a parity drive, or two, or three, you can easily rebuild the data from said failed drive. It's a great idea. The only thing real raid, like hardware or ZFS or Linus MD RAID, has over FlexRAID is that the aggregation of the drives gives increased speed. FlexRAID limits you to the speed of which ever drive is being accessed at the time.

[IFMU]

just an fyi on data recovery/back-up/etc. i've come XTREMELY close to loosing data in the past due to either hardware failure or user error so i've everything i'm worried about backing up at minimum at least once. i've an external drive i have everything on and i have dvd/bluray disc back ups. including older back ups that i've no thrown away.
so while a drive going bad may be a pain in the butt, at most i'd loose is tv shows i've downloaded to watch. anything data wise i've backed up rather thoroughly. lol

i do understand the concern there, but i am pretty sure i'm covered. minus several pieces of data going bad simultaneously, external drive and discs. or of course some type of personal disaster, fire/flood/etc.

i've gone ahead and done the extended drive for the time being. using drives 1 x 320gig 7200rpm (sata) and 1 x 320gig 5400rpm (sata). so far no problems.
i will check out that flexraid some though. see what it can offer over this easy setup.

thanks for the input everyone, it is appreciated.

[johnw]

For drive pooling/merging, you might also want to check out Liquesce:

http://liquesce.codeplex.com/