Best RAIDing solution?

[Stephen Phillips]

I have a computer case with 3 x 3.5" hard drive bays. I want to put 3 x 4TB hard drives in there, and RAID them to total them to 12TB. I am looking for a way to make 12TB of storage. What do you think is my best solution?

[Enderman]

Just use them as separate drives?

[kirashi]

10 minutes ago, Stephen Phillips said:

I have a computer case with 3 x 3.5" hard drive bays. I want to put 3 x 4TB hard drives in there, and RAID them to total them to 12TB. I am looking for a way to make 12TB of storage. What do you think is my best solution?

Don't use hardware RAID - if the RAID card or your motherboard dies, 95% of the time so does your data, unless you bought a second exact same RAID card or motherboard that you can swap out the broken one for, or you have thousands of dollars for professional recovery.

 

Use software RAID - something like Windows 8/8.1/10's Storage Spaces or StableBit's DrivePool software. I'm going to be a bit biased here since I own and love DrivePool, but in my quest to have striped data across my 2x 3TB HDD's and my 2x 500GB SSD's I went looking for alternatives to hardware RAID because of the issues I listed above.

 

There are a lot of options in the software RAID department: FlexRAID, SnapRAID, StableBit Drive Pool, Storage Spaces, UnRAID, and more. I choose StableBit's solution because of its' simplicity. Select the drives you want to pool, define how many times you need your data duplicated (once for each disk in the pool if they're all the same size), and BAM! you've got a single drive comprised of all the drives in the pool. If you don't need data duplication, you can turn it off to maximize space. Keep in mind StableBit DrivePool isn't the same thing as having something like a parity RAID setup, so it might not be for you.

 

You can find a metric butt ton of information on hoarding data with tons of hard drives here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index