I am a student networking with wireless tech. My old p4 won't handle virtualization very efficiently. So I ordered what can with under 400$. I am an intel man but I went with the amd 8120 and an asus 990fx chipset. Issue arise at I have a bunch of old drives. I am not working so money will be an issue. I have not even purchased a video card yet. I have a ton of externals for back up so I am not worried about redundancy. I found 2 laptop drives and I have a 500 gig drive. The 2 laptop drives are 160gig and 320gig. What the best raid configuration ? I was thinking about raid 0 + 1. Put the 2 laptop drive in raid 0 and the 500 gig for parity or what ever they call it. As I can afford it I would like to replace the mechanical with 2 ssd drives. I do have a separate raid pci controller card. As I get upgrade parts can I pull drives out of the array and eventually run 2 ssd drives in raid with external back ups?
No RAID, use JBOD (just a bunch of disks) for the setup. RAID is supposed to be same type hdd's. JBOD is not supported by all equipment but the controller card may do it. Provided the 500GB is healthy, just go with that. it will probably save you stress.
RAID will not work with different hard drives. What I would suggest is get a cheap 40-60GB SSD for the OS use the 320 GB for data storage and use backup software to backup both of them to the 500GB drive.
Sorry to merge into this thread, but with JBOD, can you just add a secondary HDD later on? Like if I had a 2TB installed, and ran out of room, could I add another 2TB and do JBOD?
DavGerm4- (lifted from elsewhere: JBOD, meaning "Just a Bunch Of Drives", is used to refer to one distinct concept:
all disks are independently addressed, with no collective properties. Each physical disk, with all the logical partitions each may contain, is mapped to a different logical volume: just a bunch of disks.
The concept of concatenation, where all the physical disks are concatenated and presented as a single disk, is NOT a JBOD, but is properly called BIG or SPAN.
My response to your question is this: Would you be wanting to "SPAN" one drive and another. If you use windows 7 Pro, Enterprise, or Ultimate (I think similar Vista too) you can set dynamic disks in storage manager, which i think you can span.
EDIT: In hindsight, I'm not sure this JBOD idea was a good suggestion to OP>
