First time Raid Setup - Need some help

[Age Of Eon]

This is my first time ever posting here so I apologize right off the bat if I'm missing something.

 

I currently have 4 drives in my system and I would like to raid 2 or 3 of them depending on what's possible. I don't know if Raid required identical drives or if you can mix and match because that would determine if I can run all three I want to.

 

I have a Samsung 970 Evo as my boot drive and main drive, two Micron M500s and one Micron M510. I would like to Raid all three Micron drives into one Raid configuration ideally but I would settle for just the two M500s.

 

My MOBO has an integrated Raid controller but as I've never set up a raid configuration before I dont know how to set it up and Googling around didn't help much. It's an Asus Prime Z370-A II if anyone has the exact same board.

 

How would I set up a Raid configuration with this board? Should I do Raid 1 or Raid 0? What stripe size should I go for?

 

I have a million other questions but right now I'd just love to get on the right track.

[Oshino Shinobu]

What are you actually wanting to achieve? Do you want redundancy, speed, both? Do you have a backup setup already?

[Age Of Eon]

I don't currently have a backup setup, no.

 

Since the drives themselves are decently fast and my 970 handles most of the grunt work, I'm mostly looking to consolidate for ease of use. I'd be fine sacrificing some storage space to cut down on the number of locations I can save things because it got a little out of hand before.

 

If I were to throw the two M500s in Raid 0 how concerned should I be with having one die? Would it be fine to disconnect one to do PC work and reconnect it after so long as the system never received power?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Age Of Eon said:

My MOBO has an integrated Raid controller but as I've never set up a raid configuration before I dont know how to set it up and Googling around didn't help much. It's an Asus Prime Z370-A II if anyone has the exact same board.

That doesn't have a raid controller, it has intel fake raid, don't use that.

 

54 minutes ago, Age Of Eon said:

Since the drives themselves are decently fast and my 970 handles most of the grunt work, I'm mostly looking to consolidate for ease of use. I'd be fine sacrificing some storage space to cut down on the number of locations I can save things because it got a little out of hand before.

Then id just setup a storage spaces volume in windows to work like a raid zero of all the drive(or leave collums to 1 if there different sizes). Then you get one big volume.

 

If you have a raid 0 and one drive dies all the data is toast.

 

You can do whatever you want to the drive when no power is applied to the system as long as the data on the drives stays the same.

[Age Of Eon]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Then id just setup a storage spaces volume in windows to work like a raid zero of all the drive(or leave collums to 1 if there different sizes). Then you get one big volume.

How would I go about doing that? I've messed around with Disk Management but I've never tried to set up a software raid before. Anything I should look out for?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Age Of Eon said:

How would I go about doing that? I've messed around with Disk Management but I've never tried to set up a software raid before. Anything I should look out for?

use storage spaces, not diskmanagement for raid. 

 

Basically add all the drives to a pool, make a virtual disk with the config you want.

[BrokenProgram01]

55 minutes ago, Age Of Eon said:

I don't currently have a backup setup, no.

 

Since the drives themselves are decently fast and my 970 handles most of the grunt work, I'm mostly looking to consolidate for ease of use. I'd be fine sacrificing some storage space to cut down on the number of locations I can save things because it got a little out of hand before.

 

If I were to throw the two M500s in Raid 0 how concerned should I be with having one die? Would it be fine to disconnect one to do PC work and reconnect it after so long as the system never received power?

I used to run two we blues in raid 0 for 5 years and both of them survived until I sold that computer

 

Another thing to consider is that if the drives are of different capacity's  then all the drives match the smallest drive