Nakatomi2010 Posted October 13, 2006 Share Posted October 13, 2006 (edited) I've got a MEdia Center PC I'm currently doing routine maintenance on and I'm planning on adding a 400GB SATA drive.... It's a Samsung drive I had gotten for a hundred dollars form CompUSA a week or so ago... Anyways... The Media Center PC currently has a 40GB IDE drive which I've installed the OS to, a 160GB IDE Drive which was something Western Digital sent back when I RMA'd the 120GB that had failed on me, this 160GB IDE drive is a "Recertified" drive, most likely meaning that its refurbished... I've got a 160GB SATA drive, which I haven't had any issues with, and I also have a 250GB SATA drive, also made by Samsung... The case I'm using is a Silverstone LC16M, it's got enough room to hold 6 hard drive and a DVDRW, the catch to putting in 6 hard drive though is that it means stacking 3 hard drives one right on top of the other without much breathing room, and I don't REALLY want to have to do that if I can avoid it....If I DID install the 400GB drive stacked I would stack it 160GB, 250GB, 400GB, however if I didn't I don't know which drive I would pull out...The 400GB drive is going to be getting all the data from the 250GB drive, so if I pull one of the two 160's I'd put the data from that onto the 250...What would you guys do? (The 40GB drive isn't going to come out unless it fails, all this machine doe is sit in the living room so I don't need a whole lot of hard drive space for the operating system....)edit: I'm thinking about pulling the 160GB IDE drive and putting the 400GB in it's place but then I don't know what to do with the 160GB... I could put it in my gaming rig, but I don't really want to go back to IDE, though the gaming rig does only have a single 80GB SATA drive.... Now... I DO work for a computer store and my boss would probably be willing to let me trade to recertified 160 for another 80GB SATA and I could run them in a stripped array on my gaming rig, but a trade like that would make me lose 80GB..... Edited October 13, 2006 by Nakatomi2010 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puntoMX Posted October 13, 2006 Share Posted October 13, 2006 Is this a puzzle? Or... I think I´m missing the point here .Why don´t you take out that 40GB drive? You could clone it to one of those 160GB drives so I don´t see the problem here... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nakatomi2010 Posted October 13, 2006 Author Share Posted October 13, 2006 (edited) I try to keep my OS different from my data drives in the event of failure...I COULD create two partitions on the 160IDE, a 40 and a 120, ghost my 40 to the Partitioned 40 and use the extra 120 as data storage.....And yes this is a bit of a puzzle, and as such the lives of many bits and bytes are within your hands, so choose wisely because many bits will be killed.... Edited October 13, 2006 by Nakatomi2010 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bonestonne Posted October 13, 2006 Share Posted October 13, 2006 take out the 40, install on the 80, have the 400 as RAID [5 is something i'd reccomend]personally i'd have the 400 as a RAID for everything else, it would remove the chance of failure. that way your also running all SATA, which is faster. its all in what you want to do, but you haven't given a reason to have so many drives, so just use 2 until you need more.you could even switch it up and install on the 160 and use the 400 as RAID. if your afraid of loosing data, have a RAID drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nakatomi2010 Posted October 14, 2006 Author Share Posted October 14, 2006 I have 4 drives because I have THAT much stuff on them....In the end I pulled the 40 and put in the 160 IDE and partitioned it in two, a 40 and a 120 partition, and ghost the 40 to the 40 partition.... Had to ghost the 250 to the 400, the 160 to the 250... I made this decision because the 40GB drive was making a whirring noise, was 5400RPM and had only a 2mb cahce, so it had to go... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nakatomi2010 Posted October 15, 2006 Author Share Posted October 15, 2006 Due to a somewhat killer deal on 400GB hard drives at Fry's I'm now getting another 400GB hard drive for yet another single payment of 100 dollars... So, new question....Now that I'll have two 400GB hard drives I'd like to create some sort of redundancy without losing too much storage space.... The motherboard I'm using has 4 SATA ports on it, it's the Asus A8V Deluxe, it's got 2 standard SATA controller (Populated by the 160 and 250SATA drives), and a Promise RAID controller which has the other 2 SATA ports on it, meaning that I can basically put 2 SATA drives in a RAID array...My understanding of the RAID arrays is that RAID 0 is stripping without parity, meaning that I'd be looking at a logical 800GB drive, but if one failed I'd lose all data... RAID 1 is mirrored, so I'd have a single 400GB drive, but it would be cloned in the event of failure... RAID 5 is stripping with parity, which if I understand correctly, is stripping the drives while maintaing a parity block for each block being written so that in the event of a drive failing you could easily swap out the old drive and replace it with another one and the array would repopulate the second drive with all the lost blocks, but is useless without a replacement drive....I'm thinking about doing a RAID 5 array with the two 400's, so I'd be looking at a rough total of about 800GB, but with redundancy where in the event of a single drive failing I can easily replace the dead 400GB drive and not lose any data...I'm I right, or am I wrong about my understanding of RAID 5? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 RAID 5 isn't for two drives. Think of it as RAID0 between all of your drives minus one, which is for parity. Even with 3 drives you're still "losing" 1/3 of your space. With 4 drives or more it's not too bad - the more drives, the better. With 2 drives, you can only use 0 or 1, or nothing at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bonestonne Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 i set up a G5 in school for a teacher who does video editing on it, 4 GB of ram, but 4 250GB SATA drives, its got raid 5, which sucks up an entire drive, but its safer, it has autosave and more...this computer doesn't run a RAID drive, i just don't protect the files so in the even of failure i can use it as a slave to get my files back. this computer doesnt support raid, although my other one does, however i lack a RAID card to use, so i suck it up because it wont let me use IDE2 as RAID. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 Just for the record, it is possible to use SOFTWARE Raid even if you don't have a Raid enabled motherboard/controller:http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=52012jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puntoMX Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 Nice link, didn´t see that one before. I used to have software RAID with NT on dual Pentium Pros, those were the days B). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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