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I have a bunch of hard drives. How can I put them together to maximize storage and redundancy?

Generic_Username
By Generic_Username
in Storage Devices
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Posted

I just bought a 2Tb HDD. This will be my main drive. I have a 500Gb, 250Gb, 200Gb, and 160Gb HDDs. How can I string the smaller hard drives together and have them be redundant to the larger one WITHOUT losing capacity in the larger one. I want to be able to do this in software.

 

This is what I thought of but I'm not really sure how RAID works:

All smaller drives linked with either RAID 0 or JBOD (I don't care about speeds on this one).

2Tb drive and virtual 1110Gb with Raid 1.

 

This is kind of confusing so let me sum it up. I want to make a virtual 1110Gb drive from four HDDs in the most reliable way possible. Then I want to mirror my 2Tb HDD to my virtual 1110Gb HDD. I still want to be able to use the all of the 2Tb but only back mirror the first 1110Gb. Can you help me figure out what setup I should use and explain the advantages/disadvantages of each.

 

 

Edit: I am not planning on buying any more drives. I just had extra drives laying around and wanted to make them useful. I have been using a 500Gb hard drive up until now, so it will be a while before I use more than 1110Gb. I guess I could just RAID 1 the 2Tb HDD and the 1110Gb virtual drive. The only problem I have left is forming the 1110Gb virtual drive. I could use Windows Storage Spaces but I don't think it would appear as one drive when I setup the RAID 1. So that leaves me with RAID 0 or JBOD. Is it possible to have a RAID array inside a RAID array within software?

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Theoretically you could split your 2Tb into 1110 Gb and ~890 Gb volumes and mirror it onto the small drives array... that's a really complicated solution though.

Any unknown button should be pressed even number of times.

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RAID 5 would be your best bet.

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Theoretically you could split your 2Tb into 1110 Gb and ~890 Gb volumes and mirror it onto the small drives array... that's a really complicated solution though.

Judging by how you explained it, I'm lost too D:

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Posted

RAID 5 would be your best bet.

how would he even go about configuring RAID 5 with the given drives?

 

@Generic_Username

Given your options, I just don't think RAID is a very viable solution for you. I would just maintain copies of your data on the various drives, until you can afford another 2TB drive.

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Judging by how you explained it, I'm lost too D:

Create a volume on a big drive that matches the capacity of all the small drives in RAID 0 and then make a RAID 1 out of them both.

 

I'm not good at explaining, yeah...

Any unknown button should be pressed even number of times.

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With such dissimilar drives you are going to have a hard time setting up much of anything other than JBOD. From what I understand FreeNAS's ZFS options may give you a little more flexibility, but I really don't have any experience with that side of things.

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With those different sizes, try Windows Storage Spaces feature in Windows 8:

 

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows-8/storage-spaces-pools

 

It's one I'm using right now in my franken-server (server from mixed, old parts) until I can afford properly sized / bigger hard drives.

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