i have a asus p5w dh deluxe motherboard I'm going to put to more hard drive in there 2+250gb and 2+500gb i got them free from a mate just wondering what will be best to put them in sata mode or raid .I'm going to use the 500gb hard drive for music and video .cheers

RAID can be any logical disks, so what do you mean by "SATA MODE"?

by sata mode i think he/she means normal sata connection setup and raid is two or more hdds setup as one combined hdd that uses half the space of each hdd and that allows you to have your hdd backed up on all raided drives so it can prevent errors and data loss etc. and read and write to and from the raided drives faster and thats y people use it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

I'd avoid using RAID unless you're setting up a proper array, for which I'd say you'd want to use a minimum of five drives. For four individual drives, they're probably best left that way.

Yea I know what RAID is, just wasn't sure what they meant by SATA mode.

If you have four SATA drives id set the first two drives on a RAID 1+0 and use the other two as hot-spares.

doesn't RAID1+0 requires four drives?

Originally posted by goodswipe:

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If you have four SATA drives id set the first two drives on a RAID 1+0 and use the other two as hot-spares.

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So you would actually have a RAID 1 setup on the first two drives and the other two drives would be used as hot-spares. Best way to go IMO because you have the two extra drives for backups in case either of the first two drives fail.

And no, you don't have to have four drives to setup a RAID 1+0, two drive max.

yeah, so you'd need six drives. four for the 1+0 array and two as the left-alones. RAID1+0 last time I checked was two stripes mirrored together, or two mirrors striped together.

Yes, that is correct. A RAID 1+0 is two drives mirrored, so you would need either 2 drives to make a RAID 1+0 or 4 drives to make a RAID 1+0 and so on but, in this case, we are going to use 4.


Drives 1 and 2 - RAID 1+0
Drives 3 and 4 - RAID 1+0

So for every one drive you have in your system, it has to have a "backup/mirror" to replace that drive if one were to fail. So you can't have a system with a 3 drive RAID 1+0. I forgot that there isn't support for hot spares in this configuration due to the fact that there is already a backup drive in the case that one goes out.

I think words may be failing me here in terms of how to express this, but I always thought that mirroring a drive was just RAID 1. To have RAID 1+0 you'd have to take two pairs of drives (two mirrored pairs) and stripe them together, which'd need four drives.

I know you can setup a RAID 1+0 with only two drives because I just setup a RAID 1+0 on the server in front of me. You're right about the whole 4 drive thing but, in some cases, the ACU will allow you to configure a two drive RAID 1+0 and then it's actually just a RAID 1.

With RAID 1+0 in a 4 drive config, two drives are mirrored and striped to the other two, so 4 36GB drives will give you a 72GB mirrored AND striped array. With only 2 36GB drives, your only gonna get a 72GB mirrored array, no striping at all.

Hope we are both on the same page now.

:0)

Ahh I see, that's really interesting.
Thanks for clearing that up for me!

with raid 1 if 1 drive fails the other still works and has the data from the other drive so its as if the dead drive is still operable thats why it backs up the data on both drives

thanks for all the help. all of my drives are installed and up and running . I'm going to buy 2 new dvd writes http://www.ewaggle.com/Pioneer_18X_DVD_R.../dvr-212dbk.htm but were wood i put them on the motherboard gos i got 4 hard drives cant see were to put them because they are sata .

Do you have a controller you could hook them to?

im sorry but i dont no what a controller is

Like this:

SATA PCI card

What kind of slots do you have on your motherboard? PCI-E PCI-X?

Looks like you only have 5 Sata ports with 2 IDE ports. If everything is Sata, you are a port short. Either trade one of the dvd drives for IDE or buy an adapter card. better yet get two dvd ide drives. There isn't a whole lot of difference in them. I have both...

Ahh, save yourself the trouble and get a pci card. Not only will you be able to connect your dvd drives to it, there will also be room if you want to upgrade to more storage.

Here's another one with two internal SATA ports.