RAID

cfrozer · May 10, 2017

can i use all my extra drives to one big drive? they are HDDs

scottyseng · May 10, 2017

2 minutes ago, That-Something_ said:

can i use all my extra drives to one big drive? they are HDDs

No, traditional RAID is limited by the smallest drive in the array. All drives have to be the same size. Unless you mean join all of your drives to be one large drive? That'd be RAID0

However, if you're using a third party software RAID solution, you can do a parity array with it.

vanished · May 10, 2017

Yes, you can join them all together, and you can join drives of different sizes, but I believe when you do this that every drive gets treated as if it was the size of the smallest drive.

Electronics Wizardy · May 10, 2017

Id look into btrfs in linux or storage spaces in windows. Both support 'raid like' setups with mixed drive sizes and easy adition and remove of drives and more data protection features like checksumming of data and copy on write.

kirashi · May 10, 2017

59 minutes ago, That-Something_ said:

can i use all my extra drives to one big drive? they are HDDs

Yes, you absolutely can, either using Windows Storage Spaces, or, my personal favorite, StableBit Drive Pool.

DrivePool basically lets you run software RAID based pools of drives of ANY size, and takes care of distributing the files across all drives. You can turn on duplication for data redundancy in case of a drive failure, and the best part is you can access the data stored on any drive from OTHER computers, unlike hardware RAID. This is really important considering that a RAID card failure can render your data inaccessible if you can't find an exact duplicate hardware RAID card to replace it with. And chances are you won't be able to, unless you bought 2 identical cards when you first got started.

I run 2x 500GB Crucial SSDs and 2x 3TB Toshiba HDDs in DrivePool, configured as 1000GB and a 6TB pools. However, I only have 500GB and 3TB of usable space because I have duplication enabled in case one of the two drives in each pool fail. A bonus is that DrivePool supports pseudo RAID0 read striping, effectively doubling my read speeds since it can read from 2 or more disks at once. Write striping doesn't work because it's not actually striping files between disks, but instead duplicating them, but that's fine.

Alex (the lead developer) and Christopher (one of the best support reps out there) just recently pushed out a beta fix for an conflict between DrivePool, Windows Insider Builds, and DropBox after myself and a couple other users supplied them with Blue Screen bugcheck dumps, so I can personally vouch for their support efforts in keeping their product functioning well. (kind of makes sense since they use their own product in their own storage servers too.)

Highly recommend you check it out, as it will do exactly what you're asking, and it's well worth the money.

StableBit DrivePool - https://stablebit.com/DrivePool (NOT an affiliate link - I'm just a loving user)