replacing 1tb drive

[mechanicalfluff]

Well i finally filled up my 1tb drive. Thinking about buying a few more to run in raid0.

 

The issue I'll have is picking through the drive to pick out the files that I actually want to save.

 

Wondering if i should just go one by one and transfer them over to a few ssd's i have and just transfer them back afterward. Or should I transfer it all at once to a smaller array and just be out a single drive? maybe just 'storage space' the remaining drive?

[UselessBread]

How about not running RAID 0 and instead using them as seperate drives? Advantages are that if one fails you only loose half of your data and you don't have to worry about how to transfer the stuff.

[WhatTheQuack]

Don't put mechanical HDDs in raid 0. If one fails you will loose everything. It doesn't store half of your files on one drive and half on the other, its more like half of each file on each disk, so if one fails you end up with a bunch of 'half files' which are difficult to recover.

To expand your storage, I would get another drive and use it separately (No raid) from the old one, or put them in JBOD. (just a bunch of disks) With JBOD, when one drive fills up, files are then saved to the other drive, but you will see it as one larger volume in windows. That way you will only loose half of your files if one drive fails. However with JBOD it can be difficult to work out which data is on which drive.

 

Also transferring data to SSDs frequently can shorten their lifespan, flash memory will fail after a certain amount of data has been written to it. (Usually in the region of a few terabytes though) If you want to speed up your storage, use a small SSD (64GB ) to cache each of your HDDs, or use SSHDs (hybrid drives)

[Ahnzh]

raid0 only gives you an advantage if you access/edit large video files. Instead, get a 250GB Samsung SSD and a barracuda (no raid 1 since you do not seem to value your data)