RAID Question

[Shimyr]

Hello. I have a friend who put together a new system with some older drives that are now failing him, and I needed to make sure some suggestions I gave him are feasible.

He has a Core 2 Duo system with an Asrock 775Dual-VSTA. After his Seagate 160GB started to make noises, he RMA'd it, not once, but 4 times now, and still we haven't received a hard drive I would trust. We can now officially conclude that Seagate does not know the meaning of refurbished.

So I suggested he jump into the future and get a WD 74gig 16mb Raptor for his main hard drive. I've got one of the 36 8mb raptors and love it, as will he. This unfortunately leaves a need for extra space, so I thought it'd be ideal to get 2 larger hard drives and put those in Raid 1.

As ideal as it would be for his system, can it work like that? To have one system drive not in RAID and then to have 2 other drives mirror each other in RAID 1? And if all the drives are SATA, yet he only has 2 sata ports on the mobo, could that still work? Like I said the mobo in question is the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA and he's thinking about get 1 raptor and probably 2 WD Caviar SE 250GB.

Here are links for the hardware I spoke of.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813157092
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136033
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144417

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Shimyr
As ideal as it would be for his system, can it work like that? To have one system drive not in RAID and then to have 2 other drives mirror each other in RAID 1?

Of course. In fact, this is often easier to set up, since it can sometimes be a PITA to install/boot Windows off a RAID array.

And if all the drives are SATA, yet he only has 2 sata ports on the mobo, could that still work?

Well... you'll need another SATA controller if you want to run three SATA drives and you only have two onboard ports.

Also, if your concern is merely data protection (rather than 100% uptime), consider using one of the drives as an external USB/FW drive and just making regular backups. That way a failure of the motherboard/controller/OS/PSU/etc. is less likely to trash both copies of your data. If you get a virus on your system, accidentally erase all your critical data, etc. -- RAID1 doesn't help you.