What would you do? lots of drives...

[Arkaine23]

I scrounged up a bunch of old drives for a i3570K/Asrock Z77 pro 4 system that I'm putting in my living room. Its going to fold and serve media for my TV mostly.

I have:
1 P128 SSD sata II
1 WD blue sata III 250GB, 16mb
3 WD blue sata II 250GB, 8mb
2 Seagate sata II 250GB, 8mb


So I'm trying to figure out how I want to setup the OS and if I want to use the onboard RAID. I know I shouldn't mix up the drives but I figure their performance characteristics are going to be pretty similar. I'm not as concerned about redundancy as performance, because I have 2TB of redundant storage on some external enclosures.


I was thinking:
Install the OS on the SSD as soon as transplant its OS's to a new drive and liberate it from its laptop
Raid 0 the 5 similarly-spec'd 250's

Anything important I'd have redundant copies on a pair of 1TB external RAID 1 enclosures.

I could do a Raid 10 with 4 drives instead but would have to have one drive that didn't match the rest, or do two of each type, so that one mirror was WD and the other Seagate.

Or I could do a 3-5 drive Raid 5. With 3 they'd be matched drives, with more than 3 they'd be a mix.



For that matter I could take apart my RAID enclosures and liberate 4x (identical) 1TB drives (think they're WD green), and put the 250's back in them.... but having two 250GB raid1 enclosures seems kinda lame to me, although if I used the four 1TB's in a Raid 5 or 10, I wouldn't need redundancy in the enclosures and could set them to 500GB as Raid 0 or concatenated.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

def OS and apps on SSD..

do you really "need" raid 0 performance for this system? Why not just stream the data from your 2T storage box?

toss all the 250G drives in that box...

or scrap all of them and get another 2T drive for your media box.

 

[Arkaine23]

Sorry- this is the only non-laptop I have at home.

These are what I have available for it:

1 P128 SSD sata II
1 WD blue sata III 250GB, 16mb
3 WD blue sata II 250GB, 8mb
2 Seagate sata II 250GB, 8mb


+ 4x 1TB drives currently in two USB2 raid 1 enclosures.



I just liberated the SSD from the macbook. Good thing... I was losing performance with it so full between the OS & VM on it.

The desktop system is setup with the Sata 3 drive independent and Windows installed on the other five drives in a RAID 0. Seems the boot stuff is on the independent drive however. I pulled it out and it wouldn't boot. Not that it matters. I'm going to stick the SSD in there and reinstall on that, then wipe off the OS folders from the raid 0.

I may yet setup a RAID 10 with the 250's or pull the 1TB's out of their enclosures. I don't need the performance or redundancy per se, but it seems to me that that is what redundant array of inexpensive disk is for, and well, I have a bunch of disks.

 

[EarthDog]

Sell em and get a couple (less) of larger drives.

 

[noname2020x]

 

[Automata]

Do you have something useful to add?

Arkaine23, I would suggest not using those drives in RAID unless you need the speed or redundancy. The drives are small enough that they are going to have limited usability and RAID adds a complexity factor that you may not want to deal with, irregardless of backups.

 

[||Console||]

I say raid o them and at least see how it goes , the biggest down fall I see is the noise lvl with tje 5 drives all spinning up in the living room

 

[noname2020x]

Do you have something useful to add?

I guess no funniez allowed.

Anyway, I'm with Earthdog, sell those puppies and snag a new one.That or convert them into external backup drives and better the world by giving them to friends to help them save their data.