2
Before you go say that RAID 1 mirrors one drive and cannot mirror twice, that's not what I mean.
I have a WD Black 2 TB HDD and 2 WD Blue 1 TB HDD. The WD Black is to be the main drive, and I need data redundancy. Is it possible to use the two blues coupled together as RAID drives and the black as the main drive?
DarkDestry
Posted 2015-04-25T11:25:52.847
Reputation: 198
6
Before you go say that RAID 1 mirrors one drive and cannot mirror twice, that is not what I mean.
Actually it can, though then it is often called RAID 1E.
I have a WD Black 2 TB HDD and 2 WD Blue 1 TB HDD. The WD Black is to be the main drive, and I need data redundancy. Is it possible to use the two blues coupled together as RAID drives and the black as the main drive?
You can do this in several ways:
Stripe (RAID 0) the two 1 TB WD blues to a 2 TB volume.
RAID 1 (mirror) a volume on the 2 TB WD black and a volume on the striped blues.
Create two partitions of 1 TB on the black. Create two mirrors.
Black partition 1 with blue 1
Black partition 2 with WD blue 2.
Or use a smart filesystem such as ZFS. (I am not sure how stable that is on Windows though.)
I am not sure you can do this in many hardware RAID controllers, and I doubt that BIOS supported software RAID (AKA fake RAID) will support it either.
But you can happily do it with mdadm (Linux software RAID), and I suspect that Windows will offer the same functionality. (No OS was specified in the question, so I am keeping this rather generic.)
Hennes
Posted 2015-04-25T11:25:52.847
Reputation: 60 739
1
Yes, you can. It's a hybrid configuration similar to RAID 0+1. You can search on the Internet how to set your specific hardware.
Hastur
Posted 2015-04-25T11:25:52.847
Reputation: 15 043
I am using Windows 7 and Was thinking if its possible to do this. What I was initially thinking was using the 2 WD Blue as a dynamic volume and then use the dynamic volume in a raid 1 configuration. Could you clarify if this is possible in Win7? – DarkDestry – 2015-04-25T13:26:37.710
@DarkDestry the posible raid mode are determinated by the raid controller and not by to operating system – Francisco Tapia – 2015-04-25T13:34:17.000
Is it possible to do software based raid using diskmgmt of Win7? – DarkDestry – 2015-04-25T13:59:26.543
Yeah, Windows can do this too with Dynamic Disks. This will deny most non-enterprise backup solutions or whatnot access to the data, though. ZFS isn’t available on Windows. However, Storage Spaces offer a subset of the functionality. – Daniel B – 2015-04-25T18:14:49.483