advice on multiple hard drives...

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

i have a 250g hard drive right now, and i need a new, larger one. ill probably get about a 400gig one. the thing is, that in a year, i will inevitably run out of space on these, and want to buy an additional 650gig hard drive. by this time, the 250gig drive will in no way be obsolete, and i will want to be able to use space on all of the drives.

what is the best way to make use of many hard drives of different types & sizes? what specific products could help me out?

optimally, i would like windows to see them all as one 1.3tb drive, but whatever is clever...

thanks

bchur83 · Nov 18, 2004

If you have a raid controller that supports JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), you can make them look like one big disk. Going this route offers no Redundancy or Performance gains though. I would recommend getting at least 3 identical drives and running a Raid5 configuration with them. This gives you a Speed boost and also redundancy at the same time.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

im not concerned with speed at all - all i want to be able to do is concatenate my harddrives.

is there a cheap way to just hook them up externally as d: e: and f:? cuz i dont think stuffing 4 hard drives in my computer is really feasible

bchur83 · Nov 18, 2004

Usually external enclosures are very slow. You said you werent concerned about speed, but if you went the external route, you will probably not be very pleased with the result. I would put them inside your case. What case do you currently have? You may need to look into getting a larger case. Also, a larger PS will be required if you have many drives. I currently am running 3x 80GB, 2x 120GB, 1x 40GB drives in my dually rig below. I have an Enermax 460W EPS12V PS. It is probably barely getting by with the power requirements of my rig. What kind of data are you putting on the drives?

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

ive had external hard drives before - the speed is fine for my purposes (archiving tv episodes and music)

how big is your case?? i have one of these... http://www.xoxide.com/ssttj01.html

and part of my goal with my computer is to have it be...silent. as in fanless, and huge psus just dont do that very well.

bchur83 · Nov 18, 2004

This is my case.

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=11-133-106&depa=0

It is very heavy. That case you linked look fairly big. Only 2x 3.5" internal bays though. I would go for the internal route. The thing with external drives, is that you will completely saturate the USB or Firewire interfaces. That puts quite a load on the CPU for processing. You could go with a bigger case with 120mm fans that would allow it to be fairly quiet. Depending on how much you can spend, I would get a couple (2-4) of the new NCQ 300GB SATA drives and raid them with a NCQ capable controller (Do they exist yet?). That should suit your needs for a while until a larger version comes out.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

i hardly have the money for that; the purpose of this thread is to find a way that i can continue to use my old hard drives... that would run me like a g, right?

is there a cheap way to take advantage of jbod externally?

edwardaune · Nov 18, 2004

You seem to have plenty of 5 1/2 bays unless you have a bunch of optical drives. Have you thought about putting any of the extra drives in those? I also agree that you should go the raid route, especially if your going the video recording route, that fact that it acts as one big drive will make it easier on you as far as configuration of recording goes.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

i dont record video, only dvd rips, at least for now. when i do start recording, ill buy a pair of internal raptors or something...

anyway, any potential problems with this? http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=50128983&pfp=BROWSE

finally, how does one hook up more than 2 hard drives internally? what different options are there? i cant do it with my current IDE c: can i?

edwardaune · Nov 18, 2004

I guess your using all of your 5 1/2 bays?

edwardaune · Nov 18, 2004

shrinkydinx said:
i dont record video, only dvd rips, at least for now. when i do start recording, ill buy a pair of internal raptors or something...

anyway, any potential problems with this? http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=50128983&pfp=BROWSE

finally, how does one hook up more than 2 hard drives internally? what different options are there? i cant do it with my current IDE c: can i?

Besides the price, does it incluse controller cards. That is a super high price for what seems to be just for a case and ps. Correct me if Im wrong.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

i found another site with that thing and apparently it only supports hard drives <=128gb.

i guess internal is going to be the way to go since external is so much more expensive it seems...

any answers to "how does one hook up more than 2 hard drives internally? what different options are there? i cant do it with my current IDE c: can i?"

Dc5e · Nov 18, 2004

Most computers have at least 2 IDE Channels, with each one having up to 2 devices. If you have 2 hard-drives already, you could hook up the third with the cd-rom drive, but it would be much slower because the cd-rom drive will bottleneck it (but i sounds like you don't care about performance).

Once you run out of ide channels, you could buy IDE Cards for like $30-$50. Each should add another 2 extra ide channels.

Sata is also becoming more popular, so you could get a Sata card for newer hard-drives with sata.

edwardaune · Nov 18, 2004

Like Dc5e stated, go with SATA drives if you can and get a RAID controller card with enough connections depending on how many drives you would like to hook up to it. There isnt much difference speed wise between IDE and SATA, but I would have to argue that point when it come to running RAID 0 SATA. I know speed isnt really a concern to you, but man it sure is nice when things run a little faster and smoother. If you decide to go the SATA RAID route make sure that your drives are the exact same, down to the seek time and model number. Ive ran into problems with my first raid setup with my serial drives, I had one that was the newer model than my older one. The only difference was the seek time. Wasnt stable what so ever. I exchanged to older drive with the same model and Ive been rockin since.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

well i would like to so SATA, but i was under the impression i couldnt do SATA if my c: was IDE...

this true?

(and i already got 2 HDs and 2 optical, so i got no ides left)

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

ok, so pretty much after looking at hard drives all day, im thinking i want to get two RAID 0'd (which will mean 800 right? raid 0?) 400gig drives...and go ahead and put em inside the case.

if i buy one 400gig now, is it going to be possible to turn it into two raided 400giggers without losing all the data on the first 400gb drive?

Dc5e · Nov 18, 2004

when you make the Raid Array, the drive will be erased. So it isn't possible unless you backup the data.

Also, i would highly not advise you to use Raid 0 unless you really need to, because Raid 0 offers just about no insurance if one of your drive crashes. Especially for 2x 400gb hard-drives. Thats alot of data, and if one crashes, you lose all data.

I would just keep them separate and not raid them.

I have 2x 200gb Seagates and I also have a 120gb and 80gb. I mostly use the 120gb and 80gb for storage, and my 2x200gb for video editing. I'm not as worried about having my Raid array crash because i won't be storing anything critical on them.

And unless i'm wrong, IDE and Sata shouldn't have any conflicts running together. You'd just run your os off your ide drive, and your other hard-drives on Sata. My two seagates are sata and the other two are ide.

edwardaune · Nov 18, 2004

Yes, I should have expanded on that. Do not run RAID0 by itself. There is a setup RAID 0+1. It gives you that speed advantage plus it gives you redundancy. I would run raid though. Running SATA raid along with an IDE wont give you problems. The is personally speaking but I would sell the IDE and go with a bunch of serials, again that my opinion. I like consistancy and much of a fan of mixing and matching. Just remember there are more choices than than RAID 0 and 5. Look into 0+1, best of both worlds.

shrinkydinx · Nov 18, 2004

if i had two 400's in raid 0+1, how much space would i be able to use?

Dc5e · Nov 18, 2004

is it possible with two? I thought mirroring requires 2 sets to make 1. So two hard drives in Raid 1 would only show up as 1. So wouldn't doing Raid 0+1 require a total of four hard drives?

advice on multiple hard drives...

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Similar threads