4TB of space

[portauthority]

Hello folks,

What is the best way to combine 4x1TB hard drives and make it show up as one drive? Only thing I can think out of my head is RAID 0 but reliability is an issue apparently.

P.S. I have a 5th 1TB hard drive used as backup, more will be purchased as I download more stuff obviously... backup isn't an issue here but reliability is.

[Phalesafe]

Use the 5 drives in RAID 5, that should give you 4TB of redundant storage. That way all of it is protected pretty good and can withstand any one drive failing.

[portauthority]

4 drives' worth of parity data can be written into 1TB drive? Isn't that kind of pushing it?

Besides I want to use the 5th drive for actual backups.

[CPressland]

Use the 5 drives in RAID 5, that should give you 4TB of redundant storage. That way all of it is protected pretty good and can withstand any one drive failing.

Humour me as I've never understood RAID5, If this guy has 5x1TB then how is a RAID5 going to save him if a single random hard drive fails? What dictates what gets mirrored onto the fifth drive?

[Japlabot]

with RAID5, the parity is split across all the disks in the array, there isn't a 'parity disk'. Not sure how it works exactly but RAID5 is the way to go

[CPressland]

with RAID5, the parity is split across all the disks in the array, there isn't a 'parity disk'. Not sure how it works exactly but RAID5 is the way to go

Thats confusing... I may have to rip apart an old PC, shove four 120GB hard drives in RAID 5 into it and see what happens when I damage one of the hard drives :p

[gwai lo]

Just use JBOD or WHS or something, additionally RAID isn't a backup solution, it's an uptime solution.

[capr]

Just use JBOD or WHS or something, additionally RAID isn't a backup solution, it's an uptime solution.

yepp... I would say just have the 4 drives run in raid zero this would give you huge performance gain but you would only have 1 tb of space to work with. plus side to that is you can easily do daily backups of that 1tb onto your 5th drive.

[Smigit]

Is the 4TB partition to be used as a primary partition for an OS or a secondary one?

Thought I'd ask since I don't believe Windows supports boot drives of greater than 2TB unless you make use of EFI which I'm not sure is particularly common on motherboards yet.

I could be wrong, but when I was looking at larger partitions earlier in the year 2TB came off as a barrier at the time for a primary boot partition.

[Colin-uk Veteran]

JBOD sounds like a good option to use here imo.

[Pseudonym]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't JBOD just as susceptible to HDD failure as RAID 0. As in, if one of the 4 drives fails, all the data is lost, no?

[Odom Member]

JBOD puts different sized HDD's into a single volume. The way the data is spread on all the drives depends on the host controller. It is however very unlikely that the data will be written sequencially, which would mean, that if you loose one disk, you're very likely to loose it all, just like with RAID0.

If you want reliability, which one do you want? Hardware or data?

For hardware, you can go with a RAID5. With 4x1TB drives in RAID5, you wil have 3TB to use. If any drive fails, your data is still there and accessible, until you manage to replace the failed drive with another one.

For software reliability, in case there is data corruption, the only thing that helps is to back up a volume to another volume. RAID for this is useless, as any data corruption would instantly be mirrored across all drives.

You could go with 2 RAID0 of 2TB each. Set up periodic backups from one RAID to the other. If you have data corruption on the main RAID0 array, just restore the data from your backup on the 2nd array. If a drive fails in any RAID0 array, you 'll loose the array, but you will have the latest backup from the other array.

I also wouldn't recommend doing this on a motherboard controller. Either get a NAS or a dedicated RAID controller. This will add significant overhead to your motherboard and my experience with motherboard RAID setups isn't the best.

You can read up on RAID here:

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

[Japlabot]

Thats confusing... I may have to rip apart an old PC, shove four 120GB hard drives in RAID 5 into it and see what happens when I damage one of the hard drives :p

You don't need to damage anything, just disconnect one of the drives as if had failed.

yepp... I would say just have the 4 drives run in raid zero this would give you huge performance gain but you would only have 1 tb of space to work with. plus side to that is you can easily do daily backups of that 1tb onto your 5th drive.

if you had the drives in RAID0, you will still get the full 4TB, the bits will just be striped across all of the drives.

[CPressland]

You don't need to damage anything, just disconnect one of the drives as if had failed.

But damaging it would also be a stress release ;)

[gwai lo]

JBOD puts different sized HDD's into a single volume. The way the data is spread on all the drives depends on the host controller. It is however very unlikely that the data will be written sequencially, which would mean, that if you loose one disk, you're very likely to loose it all, just like with RAID0.

True enough, I'd definitely go with WHS then.

[portauthority]

There will be a boot partition of about 40GB and then the rest will be storage space. I guess I need GPT partitions still?

As much as I'd like to get a hardware RAID controller nothing fits my budget. The Dell PERC 5 RAID controller came up as a good alternative but it's got all kinds of bugs with Intel motherboards, and I'm not even sure my mobo allows non-video card devices in the PCIe x16 slot (I have the Intel DQ35JO motherboard)

I may have to sacrifice 1TB and go with the 3x1TB RAID5 solution ... thanks guys. 5th will be used for actual backups.

P.S. WHS sounds nice, but I already have a seperate device acting as a domain controller.

[fix-this!]

Hello folks,

What is the best way to combine 4x1TB hard drives and make it show up as one drive? Only thing I can think out of my head is RAID 0 but reliability is an issue apparently.

P.S. I have a 5th 1TB hard drive used as backup, more will be purchased as I download more stuff obviously... backup isn't an issue here but reliability is.

silly question but why the need for soo much hdd space ?

[dolby71]

I have more than 1TB and I'm out of space :(

Gonna replace one of the 500GB with a 1.5TB Seagate soon

[aussiefloyd_fan]

But damaging it would also be a stress release ;)

just mail it to me..... my sad has the computer illiterate-ness to completly destroy data on a computer in less than 30 seconds when a reboot happens on a pc........ plus you can be sure that a charity company can put the drive to good use

[Odom Member]

I have more than 1TB and I'm out of space :(

Gonna replace one of the 500GB with a 1.5TB Seagate soon

Read this, then think about it again.

I'm in the same boat as you, wanted to get a bigger NAS with 4x1.5TB, but this put me off.