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?
