Can I do raid 1 with 3 drives: 1tb & two 500gb's & use 2 500gbs to stripe 1gb?

Can I do raid 1 with 3 drives: 1tb & two 500gb's & use 2 500gbs to stripe 1gb?

Can the raid see the three drives as two drives and use the smaller drives to stripe the data from the bigger one?

I have a few older 500gb and 320gb drives that I want to put together so that they can stripe the data from my other drives in a raid config.

Wouldn't that be a 0+1? You want to stripe the 2 500GB and use the the 1TB to mirror, right?

I think you'd be better off with ZFS for mismatched HDD's.

yes 0+1, stripe the 500's and mirror the 1tb, I didn't think this was possible... it is?

ABout ZFS, how would you implement this on a home-user windows 8.1 setup? I don't believe windows supports this natively....

Didn't realize you were trying to do this for a Windows machine that was a user system... Those details were skipped.
It seemed like you were trying to do something for server storage.

I'm not sure that what you're thinking is possible, honestly.
You can RAID mismatched drives, but I don't think exactly what you're thinking is going to work.

After a little search...

...search of specs of most onboard controllers.

Not knowing exactly what motherboard/system you are talking about using the 1TB drive plus two 500GB drives in an array on, it is not known if you intend to have the operating system installed on either the 1TB drive or the 2 drives in raid 0.

However if it were an Intel motherboard with only onboard raid to use, there is no way to force the setup of a raid 0 array being a part of a single drive raid 1 array since you cannot setup raid 1 on a single drive only. 4 drives yes but 3 drives no so far as is visible to me.

However you could setup the raid 0 array of the two 500GB drives and use FreeFileSync to copy the raid 0 array files to the 1TB drive. Of course doing work would be best done to the Raid 0 array since it would 'work' faster than the single 1TB drive. Let the array be sync'd to the 1TB drive. A thought.

http://www.freefilesync.org/features.php
Free File Sync

A key feature listed: Automate sync as batch job.

RGone...

Most mobo don't support 0+1 correct. You need a card. In that setup, the OS goes on the r0 portion, not the parity drive.