Home storage advice

ethandeguire · April 6, 2017

I'm putting together a computer for my mother to use as her daily pc and to function as our home storage setup and want to build a raid 5 array for redundancy and efficiency using 2tb wd blues.

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Desktop-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B013QFRS2S - 2tb

I just want to make sure that if i order 3 of these drives that i can configure them to raid in windows 10 and have 4 tbs of space total. If im right, one drive can fail and all of my data will still be there.

Am I right?

TapfererToaster · April 7, 2017

Basicly, yes. you will get 3.6 TB to use. You will need another drive as Boot-drive tho. You cannot create a Raid-5 in the windows installer and then install windows on it.

If your Motherboard supports it, you could create a raid-5 via your motherboard chipset and then install windows on it.

Just remember, with windows software raid you take quite a hit to your write performance. last time i tested it, it way < 70 MB/s.

Electronics Wizardy · April 7, 2017

20 minutes ago, TapfererToaster said:

If your Motherboard supports it, you could create a raid-5 via your motherboard chipset and then install windows on it.

Don't use mobo raid, esp for raid 5, this will also be for a storage drive so you don't need to boot from it.