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Raid 1 with two hard drives

Fox-Man20
By Fox-Man20
in Storage Devices
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I am looking at building my first PC and am curious about using two hard drives. The two I am planing on using are WD Desktop Mainstream internal HDD, one 1TB and one 500GB. Since they are the same manufacturer, I was thinking that they could be compatible. I'm planning to use an ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard with a AMD FX 8350 with 16GB of DDR3. Thanks for the help

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I am looking at building my first PC and am curious about using two hard drives. The two I am planing on using are WD Desktop Mainstream internal HDD, one 1TB and one 500GB. Since they are the same manufacturer, I was thinking that they could be compatible. I'm planning to use an ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard with a AMD FX 8350 with 16GB of DDR3. Thanks for the help

If you do raid 1 with those hdds, you'll not be able to use half of the space of the 1TB drive.

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If you want to use the full 1TB of space on your hard drive, you will need another 1TB drive.

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out." - Carl Sagan.

"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" - Edward I. Koch

"I didn't die! I performed a tactical reset!" - Apollolol

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Would I be able to do it if I partitioned the 1TB to around 500GB? I found the 1TB online on the shelf for $39.99 US at a store and it has a One-per-Household on the product, and they do get/check your address if you buy something from them. Unless I wanted to buy it online and send it to my friends house and spend a little bit extra over my pre-OS budget. If not, I would just have to go to my plan B and get a different set of 1TB HDD's, is that you are saying?

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Would I be able to do it if I partitioned the 1TB to around 500GB? I found the 1TB online on the shelf for $39.99 US at a store and it has a One-per-Household on the product, and they do get/check your address if you buy something from them. Unless I wanted to buy it online and send it to my friends house and spend a little bit extra over my pre-OS budget. If not, I would just have to go to my plan B and get a different set of 1TB HDD's, is that you are saying?

Unfortunately, no I don't think so. In order to set up RAID, you will need to get into your BIOS which only sees drives, not partitions.

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out." - Carl Sagan.

"I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" - Edward I. Koch

"I didn't die! I performed a tactical reset!" - Apollolol

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Because I have had personal experience in lossing personal information on a computer and not being able to retrive it (had a hard drive crash with 5+ years of information. I have read that with RAID 1, there is basicly a copy of your HDD (plus I just took an A+ prep class).

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Unfortunately, no I don't think so. In order to set up RAID, you will need to get into your BIOS which only sees drives, not partitions.

I am planning on formatting the main HDD Pre/Post OS install, then install the second drive and put activate RAID

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Ok, before you go to far down this RAID 1 rabbit whole, RAID is not a backup.  Yes, your data is on both drives but this only protects you from drive failures.  It does not protect you from accidental deletion or natural disaster.

 

My recommendation would be to use the 1TB as your sole drive but have the 500GB in the computer as a backup drive.  You can back up to it with either the built in windows backup or a third party program like Crashplan (the free version).

 

The best thing, would be if you can afford $5/month, is to get an online backup solution so that you have an off site backup protected from powersurges, failed PSUs, fire, the dog, etc.  There are a bunch of good ones our there

 

https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

http://www.carbonite.com/

https://www.backblaze.com/

http://mozy.com/product/mozy/personal

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Ok, before you go to far down this RAID 1 rabbit whole, RAID is not a backup.  Yes, your data is on both drives but this only protects you from drive failures.  It does not protect you from accidental deletion or natural disaster.

 

My recommendation would be to use the 1TB as your sole drive but have the 500GB in the computer as a backup drive.  You can back up to it with either the built in windows backup or a third party program like Crashplan (the free version).

 

The best thing, would be if you can afford $5/month, is to get an online backup solution so that you have an off site backup protected from powersurges, failed PSUs, fire, the dog, etc.  There are a bunch of good ones our there

 

https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

http://www.carbonite.com/

https://www.backblaze.com/

http://mozy.com/product/mozy/personal

You took the words right out of my mouth.

 

OP, listen, don't take this the wrong way, but if you're asking these sorts of questions about RAID, it's not for you.

 

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. There are specific scenarios where RAID is a good idea, there are MANY scenarios where it's a very bad idea and if you don't know precisely what you're doing, could cost you dearly in data and headaches.

 

If it's something you are interested in learning, I recommend you go on craigslist and find somebody trying to unload a bunch of old hardware. Try to get yourself a cheap computer with a hardware raid card and a bunch of old drives and go to town building arrays, writing junk data and generally doing stuff that you'd never do on your main system. Sometimes the best way to learn how to do it right is by doing it wrong a whole bunch of times!

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Thank you guys, even though you took it too far and gave me more information then I wanted. If I have learned two things, these are what they are

1. I am too inexperienced in data backup.

2. If I want information, I will go/ask here AFTER looking up somewhere else because I just looking for a yes or no question.

Thank you for your help.

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