newbie RAID questions

[notfound]

I am looking to setup a raid configuration and I have never done this before. I have 2 questions...

1) I know that 2 identical drives are ideal, but what if I am having trouble getting another one with the exact same model #. What if they are the both Maxtor, both 40gb, both 7200rpm... would it work?

2) now I know that you can either stripe (which is for performance... at least that is what I was getting from what I was reading) the drives, or you can mirror the drive (for backup). Okay well here is my question. What if I have 3 hard drives, 2 are maxtor 40gb 7200 rpm, and the other 1 is an IBM 40gb 5400rpm drive... now can I strip them for more speed, but also have it mirror to the 3rd drive? Or could I setup it up some other way to just use the raid for striping the 2 maxtors and have a program or something automatically (like once a day or something) backup information to the ibm drive??

Any info is greatly appreciated.

 

[TheCorm]

Striped and Mirrored is Raid 5 I believe which you can't do with the onboard raid but I'm sure there is a way that you can just used striped with the 2 maxtors and then use some backup software to take a backup onto the IBM Hard Drive....not sure what software though but you can get some like Iomega's Quicksynk for peerless which backs up when files are changed so you have an ongoing backup routine in the background.

 

[notfound]

thanks for the info... now does anyone have the answer to number 1??? would it work with 2 drives that are the same brand, size, and speed, but are different model #'s???

 

[Souka]

1) I know that 2 identical drives are ideal, but what if I am having trouble getting another one with the exact same model #. What if they are the both Maxtor, both 40gb, both 7200rpm... would it work?

It should work just fine.

College of mine setup a 4gb 4200rpm laptop drive (with an IDE adapter) and a 20gb 7200rpm IDE drive together in raid 0. Thing ran slower than the 2gb drive by itself, but worked.

It's best to keep the drives identical of course.....slight speed/performance differences can things to get out of sync, slowing down the performance. And to make things worse, some IDE drives really don't perform well in Raid configs(read an extensive review somewhere regarding this...don't remember where, but they compared a number of HD's).

 

[mrzed]

No problem at all. You can even use different size and speed if you want. If you stripe (RAID 0) two drives of different sizes, you just end up with the smaller size for your total available space. If you have one drive that is faster (as you probably do, your newer Maxtor 40 Gb will be faster than the older model) then your speed will be limited by that of the slowest drive.

The RAID setup you are describing with 3 drives is actually RAID 0+1, not RAID 5. In RAID 5 all the disks contain redundancy information, not just one.

 

[Alizarin]

By my understanding, and on my RAID controller, raid 0+1 requires 4 drives. Each "extra" drive makes backs up it's partner that makes a piece of the RAID 0 array.

Incase you couldn't decipher my gibbrish: Basically it's a RAID 1 array of 2 RAID 0 arrays