RAID - Can I have two drives in RAID, and the other two standalone?

[Panarchy]

Hello

I have two drives;

1. Maxtor (SATA) 500GB
2. WesternDigital (IDE) 400GB

And am planning on buying two more drives (unsure of brand yet);

1. (SATA) 500GB
2. (SATA) 500GB

I am planning on making the two new drives RAID 0.

But I want to keep my other two drives seperate from the RAID setup. In other words, I don't want them in RAID. I only want my new drives in RAID.

Please tell me if this is possible (I have an ASUS P5K-E WiFi motherboard).

Thanks in advance,

Panarchy

 

[Panarchy]

Update;

Found out that I can.

 

[wahnula]

I would recommend making one of those stand-alone drives a 1TB drive for regular backup of the RAID 0 array, as a RAID 0 array is twice as likely to fail as a single drive. There is no redundancy and with a 1TB array you will need a 1TB+ backup drive. Luckily they are close to $100/TB now.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Panarchy]

Thanks...

Ah, what exactly will RAID 0 do for me?

Because I have found that the cheap 500GB are 16MB Cache, yet the cheap 1TB are 32MB Cache.

And if all RAID 0 does is double the cache... well you understand what I am asking.

Is that what RAID 0 does? To make it (almost) double the speed?

Panarchy

 

[denisfr]

Hello,

RAID controller does not matter how many cache has each disk.

It only 'splits' data on disks when writting in order to gain speed.

If a disk with 32 MB cache responds quicker than the disks with 16 MB, the controller will wait for both 'acknowledgement' of the two disks in order to inform the OS that I/O has securely ended.

 

[wahnula]

RAID 0 "stripes" the data across two drives to allow you to read & write at potentially twice the speed of a single drive, but since the data is spread across two drives if one goes all the data is toast. It is for speed-demons only, like gamers and some CAD applications, but should not be used for data.

Check out this guide:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/single.htm

...that explains the difference between the RAID levels. You will not find the word "cache" on the RAID 0 page. My current favorite (for data) is a nested array, RAID 1+0, which takes the striped RAID 0 array and mirrors it for safety.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Panarchy]

Okay, well thanks!