RAID-ing two different-sized SATA drives

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:34 pm

For whatever reason, I haven't had the chance or reason to work with RAID-ing PC drives until now. Honestly, I know very little about it... thus the reason for this post!

Anyway, I've been working from a single 80Gb SATA drive (Maxtor 7200rpm) since I got my gaming rig a couple years ago. It's starting to fill up, so I recently installed a refurbished 250Gb SATA drive (Seagate 7200rpm). They both connect to the motherboard via individual SATA cables, and currently show as two separate logical drives. The machine runs XP; no dual-booting.

For various reasons, I'd like to combine them into a single logical drive, but I'm not sure about how best to do this, or even if I should, given the fact they're not identical disks.

I've done a little research, and it looks like a software RAID might be my best bet. Any suggestions, warnings, recommendations, etc.?

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:37 pm

You can use XP's built in Dynamic Volumne instead of RAID. This makes all your drives look like 1. Only problem is if you lose one drive, you lose what's on it.

IIRC, RAID doens't work with non-like drives.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:23 pm

Nope, you can format your 250 GB drive as an 80GB drive and create a RAID0 array of 80GB. But that'd be stupid, throwing away 170GB of capacity on just the one drive, and sacrificing a total of 250GB...

But Foil this is a moot point: you'd be a fool to make a RAID0 array. RAID0 is stupid, retarded, expensive, dangerous and is no faster than a single fast HDD. Seriously.

I guarantee you: a RAID0 array will make your life a living hell, and the chances of losing ALL your data is very high indeed.

RAID0 is designed for servers where there are simply stunning numbers of transactions, and seek times must be absolutely minimal - there is NO justification for a domestic installation.

There is one exception: RAID 5, with an array of at least 4 identical HDDs (or more) because RAID 5 combines RAID0 and RAID1 which is exactly what you want in a RAID array: speed, AND redundancy. But, you have the expense of buying four identical HDDs - and to make it worthwhile they need to be very fast and very large drives...

See where this is going?

DON'T DO IT MAN!

Just go out and get yourself the biggest, fattest HDD you can buy, (bigger = faster) and if you REALLY need more speed, get yourself a 36GB Raptor and use that as your XP Swap File drive, and cache drive (for apps).

Then you can use your old drives as 330GB of backup space: Much Better Idea(tm).

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:41 pm

Mobius wrote:...See where this is going?

DON'T DO IT MAN!

Gotcha.

Thanks for the explanation. Now I'm not sure why I was even thinking RAID was a workable option for me.

Mobius wrote:Just go out and get yourself the biggest, fattest HDD you can buy, (bigger = faster)...

I'm not in a financial position where I can just "go out and get" anything over a few bucks. The 250Gb drive was a refurbished deal I got with under $45 of Christmas gift $$, so that's all I have to work with.

CDN_Merlin wrote:You can use XP's built in Dynamic Volumne instead of RAID. This makes all your drives look like 1.

Looks workable, although I'm not completely sure. Anybody have any experience with it?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:10 pm

Don't listen to Mobius. While RAID0 is dangerous, it is neither retarded, or expensive (especially when compared to RAID5). And RAID0 is most definitely faster then a single drive.

That being said, if your motherboard has it, the option you are looking for is not RAID at all, but instead called JBOD which stands for \"Just a Bunch Of Drives\". It will let you stick together any size drives and will deliver to the OS a single logical drive that is equal to the capacity of all drives in the array added together. It carries the same risk as RAID0, but none of the speed benefits.

Foil · Post by **Foil** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:27 pm

Krom wrote:...if your motherboard has it, the option you are looking for is... JBOD which stands for "Just a Bunch Of Drives". It will let you stick together any size drives and will deliver to the OS a single logical drive that is equal to the capacity of all drives in the array added together. It carries the same risk as RAID0, but none of the speed benefits.

I'm not worried about speed; I just want all the storage on the same logical drive.

So it looks like my best choices are either a hardware solution like JBOD (if available on my motherboard) or a software solution, like XP's Dynamic Volume.

Anyone have experience using either one of these?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:52 pm

JBOD is the best option, while still a fakeraid, it isn't as bad as XP's pure software mode.

Personally I would use them as separate drives and drive letters. That way you won't have to install a RAID driver to get XP installed on them.

I have my system partitioned into three different drives. C: is only 8 GB and has Windows, office, plus a few other critical small programs installed. D: is 280 GB, has the rest of the programs installed, all games, and is the working download drive. E: is a 800 GB RAID0 for mass storage of media files, DVD rips, music, anything too big for one of the smaller drives, etc.

DarkShadow · Post by **DarkShadow** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 1:28 pm

I have had 2 80gig drives in raid0 for over 2 years now with no problems yet but I do save anything important on to my 40 gig backup drive. You can tell I am alittle behind the current hardware, so the raid option was the cheapest way to get a little more speed out of my 4 years old system.