setting up raid

[insanepsycho]

ok so here i am i am currently running on 1 hardrive and i have three brand new ones that are the exact same as the one i am using. how can i set up a raid 10(which is the striped and mirrored right?) without losing all the data on my current hardrive?

would i be able to first set up a mirror and then set up a striped with the original and a new one and then set the whole thing up as raid 10?

that way i think it would go orginal drive -----> mirror then i would keep the mirror the way it was and take the original and stripe it with a new one and then have the striped drives mirror the mirror at which point ill wipe the mirror and install the 4th drive making the orginal mirror and the new 4th striped mirrors?

 

[saltynay]

You can't just back up the drive simplest way. You would need a raid card not the onboard raid on the mobo to do either raid 10 or raid0+1 they are not the same but both use mirroring and striping. Do raid5 your mobo should support it
AC&NC | RAID.edu - RAID Levels - RAID Level 5 - RAID 5

I didn't understand the second part it sounds like one of those puzzles to get people over a river with just one boat

 

[insanepsycho]

well actually my mobo does support raid 10 its a p6t deluxe i just want to figure out how to not lose all my data

 

[kmote]

You will not be able to do that. Your controller needs to initialise the disks, your data will not survive this.

 

[insanepsycho]

ok so the only way would be to image it on an external drive? and then set up my raid and then image my raid from the external?

also would raid 5 be better for me? i heard that raid 5 is slower than raid 10

 

[dark strike1]

Well first off it's called raid 1+0, not Raid 10 (ten), in the IT world that makes you look like you have no idea what your talking about, just a heads up.

In your case Raid 5 is the way to go, sure your using one drive as a parity, but its better if one drive were to fail cause then you just replace that drive, tell the mobo to restructure the raid, and it does the simple 1+x(parity)=3 and builds your new drive and no data is lost.

Raid1+0 and on is mostly for business practices, like I work for ecommerce and we have a raid 1+0+0 set up in a Colo. So Raid 5 is the best for home users atm.

 

[insanepsycho]

well actually saying raid 10 is the same as saying raid 1+0 since no raid goes above 9, but once again ur not answering the question of is 10(or 1+0) faster than raid 5 for me i dont care to much for the easy recontruct im looking for pure performance and safety since a raid 5 can only take 1 disk fail as well

 

[saltynay]

Dark strike RAID10 and RAID0+1 are different things . In RAID0+1 a single drive fail will cause it to becomes a raid0 array until rebuilt with a new working drive.

You also get raid50 (otherwise known as raid0+3) come on people do your research!!!

 

[dark strike1]

Okay well I work in an IT department and if I said Raid Ten, they would start laughing at me haha.

In terms of raids you are looking for a faster read speed, cause write speed only matters when installing or downloading stuff. So read speed is the main thing we want to take a look at. So in this case Raid 5 and Raid 1+0 are the same in terms of read speed.
Now Raid 1+0 is totally better at writing speeds, but that doesn't matter unless you have a business with virtual servers and need that fast write speed to pop-up VS's really really fast.

 

[kmote]

RAID 1+0 = RAID 10. Stripe across mirrored pairs.
RAID 0+1 = RAID 01. Mirrored Stripes.
You will not notice the difference in performance between RAID 5 and 10 although RAID 10 does have better performance.