Raid and 3 drives....

[TweakerXP]

A friend wants to put RAID on his system. He has three drives, two are 60gig and one 30gig, all are ATA133. He has a motherboard that has four RAID channels on it.

QUESTION.....

Can you hook up three drives with RAID? Or do you have to have equal number of drives?

If you can hook up three drives , do you hook them up just like a two drive setup?

Thanks

[Sterling_Aug]

Three drives will only let you hook up either RAID0 (striping for improved performance) or RAID1 (inmpoved data backup security).

Four equal sized drives would let him set up RAID0+1 which has the best of both spped and data integrity.

In my opinion, neither RAID0 nor RAID1 are worth it for the average Joe. Way too may hassles. I know, I have tried them and dropped the idea after a day of each.

[Midknyte]

Striping would work, but you must have drives of the same size. if he has a 30 and a 60 in a stripe, you will end up with 60 total (30+30). not worth it. you can do a stripe with the 2 60s and then have the 30 as a single drive. if one drive in a stripe goes bad, the whole volume is dead.

If you mean RAID5, then probably not. RAID5 requires at least 3 drives, but you probably don't have that capability with that motherboard. I haven't see a board that could do RAID5 on IDE. There are pci cards that can do it, but I've never seen an onboard one. You still need the same size drives to do a RAID5. If you have 2 60s and 1 30, then the will all have to be set to 30.

Mirroring only works with 2 drives. You can mirror the 60s if you want, but it doesn't help performance. Mirroring is for fault tolerance.

like sterling said, it can be a pain to set up or recover from it he doesn't know what he is doing. if you choose to use RAID, then put each drive on its own RAID channel. :D