Raid question and help!?

[NerdGoneWild]

Hello everyone!

I have never attempted to Raid HDD's before. I have been filling my HDD's pretty quick since I finished my first build and was able to run more games and use the PC for more than just browning the web and playing low quality games.

To the point.

I now have a Corsair Peformance Pro 128gb SSD that has my OS and a few of my more played games.
I have 2 WD Black edition 64mb cache 1TB Internal HDD's
I have 1 WD Black edition 32mb cache 1TB Internal HDD

I already have files on the 2 64mb WD but the 32mb is blank. I can easily move all files to my mac 2tb passport or my WD external if I will lose the files during RAID.

I was using 1 of the 64mb for photos, videos, and document files, the other I was using for music, movies, and other easily replacable files.

What RAID would be best for me, and does anyone have a good video/link to how to set up the RAID that is best for my situation. (If I do RAID 2 HDD's, when I click mycomputer will it just show one device for the two connected?)

My specs are in signature

Thanks again everyone, I don't know what I would do without your guys help!

[Waco]

What kind of RAID would you want to set up? The only "safe" RAID levels won't increase your space - they'll cut it down by either 50% or 33% for 3 drives (depending on what level of RAID you use).

[wevsspot]

Nerd, you might be better off selling your current SSD, the one 1TB 32Mb cache WD and one 1TB 64Mb cache WD.  Keep the newer of the two 1TB 64Mb WD drives for storage and other apps that won't benefit much from an SSD.

 

Use your sale money to invest in one 240Gb or 256Gb SSD for your OS and other apps that might benefit from the increased speed of an SSD.

 

If that doesn't work into your budget you could pick up another 128Gb SSD and put it in RAID0 with your existing SSD.  Just remember that RAID 0 isn't redundant, meaning that if one drive fails you'll lose all your data.  You could create a disk image of your existing OS drive and clone that onto a new RAID array.  But if you are going the RAID0 route, I'd highly recommend a fresh install just to be safe.

 

As far as how a RAID shows up when you're in Windows - it shows up as a single volume (drive).  

 

Also, be advised that your current chipset doesn't support TRIM, so you would need to make sure that your SSDs have a good garbage collection routine or over time the performance of your SSDs will degrade.  

[NerdGoneWild]

Thanks for all your replies guys.

As far as money goes, I take my state Registered Nursing boards around July of next year. So as of now, I am not looking to spend much more on this build as my focuses are on studies. When I do get a job I will hand this build to my wife and build a better beast without any cut corners. She ended up buying a new macbook pro retina, a 27" iMac, and a new Ipad... and always complains she can't play games with me -_-

I always hear people talking about Raid, and people always ask me "you running RAID...blabla" So I just assumed it was a good thing to do.

I attached a screenshot of my HDD usage.

[Waco]

Well what are you looking to accomplish?

 

If you just want your storage pooled together IIRC Windows 7 can do drive spanning pretty easily. It won't offer any additional resilience against failure but it would give you one larger storage drive.

[wevsspot]

RAID0 is an effective way to double the capacity of a smaller SSD that you might have purchased back when the cost per gigabyte was really high.  I've done the same thing in my personal rig.  As mentioned previously though, there is double the chance of a volume failure (because you now have two drives that could fail).

 

Other than that, RAID0 with SSDs is mainly for bragging rights or epeen satisfaction.