About RAID and current data

Hey, so it seems like I need more space, well we always do but, its likely that I'll want to get more soon.

First here is my setup,

HDD1 (4? years old) = Drive E (windows XP partition), Drive C (installed programs)

HDD2 (1 year) = Drive D (My documents ie. Videos, Music, Work stuff, Pictures; and some temporary files)

So thought the first HDD is older, its the second one that I really need more space for, between my music, photography, and photo manipulation hobbies there is really no space on there.

Ideally I want to add a third harddrive and make it apart of Drive D but I really have no experiance with RAID so I have a few questions.

First; can I RAID HDD2 with a new harddrive without moving/losing the stuff that is already on there? I'm guessing not

and Second ... well I am worried about the whole RAID thing itself. Is it going to be out of my scope to repair if there are troubles. Frankly I've heard more than a few RAID horror stories for trying to restore data and that sort of thing.



thanks for any help, I know I've been asking a lot lately but haven't really commented otherwise ... heh

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Thats why there is Raid 0+1! (requires four hdds)

From what I know, no.

What I have read before that is an option under Xp is a spanned dynamic disk

To me that seems the easy way, unless you are worried about hdd 2 dieing

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A spanned volumn sounds kind of like what I want ... I'm not trying to increase performance (read/write time or some such) I just want more SPACE, but yes I am worried about one drive dieing and loosing 500gb of stuff. heh. It doesn't help that I am honestly not familiar with well storage, I've never given it much thought (other than I always thought 400gb would be enough!) ha

Maybe I am being paranoid, whats the life expectancy of a harddrive?

hehe, RAID 0+1 would be awsome but I don't want to be buying two new harddrives.

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Spanning drives are NOT what you want-in a spanning configuration if one drive dies that the parition is spanned across, the entire thing is gone! Its not safe.
Drive spanning should only be used across multiple RAIDs-never in a situation like yours.
RAID is only good for redundancy and speed increases-not as a backup, or for massively increasing drive space.
The easiest thing for you would be to simply purchase a new drive and add that as a new drive and move some of your data onto it. If you have a RAID controller in your computer, RAID 5 might be an acceptable compromise of space and reliability. In RAID 5 you have three drives of equal size and two of them are 'data' drives and one of them is for redundancy. In this configuration one of your drives can die, and you will be fine. However, you only have access to 2/3 of your total disk space. So if you have three 500GB drives you will only have 1TB of disk space available instead of the anticipated 1.5TB.

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Heh, thats exactly what has me so worried. For what you guys have said and what I've been trying to find online, the only decent option seems to be just install a third HDD as a third Drive. That just seems to be a pain trying to divide everything up.

I'm actually pretty tempted to buy a 500gb drive and just toss the old 200gb one. Guess I will wait for a bit (since I cant afford a $200 drive right now anyhow) and think about it.

thanks

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You can always buy an external chassis and use the 200GB as an external HD for portability.

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Well yes, I wouldn't ACTUALLY throw it away. Heck I still have my 56k modem haha.

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Alright, so I'm seriously considering a 500gb drive so my next question is .... are there any concerns or problems just from having such a large density drive?

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Slow read time... and the whole if it crashes it's all gone thing. That's about it.

FYI - Disk Spanning theoretically does make you lose all your stuff... unless you know alittle about computer forensics. I've recovered files from a drive with a corrupted format structure using forensics tools before. It's just very time consuming. Unfortunately, a head crash is still a head crash and nothing can salvage data from that.

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"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."-Ken Olson, founder of DEC, 1977.

In response to the slow read time, as long as it is used as a secondary HDD and is not the one running the OS and games, then you probably won't notice a difference in access time (if you get a decent HDD).

But yeah, if it crashes you lose everything. The same is true with any HDD though. If you need 500G of storage, I would suggest 2 HDD that are 250GB - 300GB each. I'll bet you could get the 2 cheaper than the 1 anyway.

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