RAID Hard drive

[bob1286]

This is the board that I put into my new game rig, based on suggestions here an kind of happy with the performance thus far. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131873

What I want to do now is implement some form of RAID on my drives, granted I have a 2 TB drive on order and now currently, have a 1.5 TB don't seem like it was enough space.  I want to make the 2 TB the main drive and the 1.5 an extension of that drive.  The board only allows for 0/1/5/10

[camerongray]

You would really need both drives to be the same size and by using RAID with no redundant disks then if either of your 2 drives fail you will lose all your data.  You're better off just having them as 2 separate disks and spreading your data between them.

[bob1286]

You would really need both drives to be the same size and by using RAID with no redundant disks then if either of your 2 drives fail you will lose all your data.  You're better off just having them as 2 separate disks and spreading your data between them.

That is kind of what I thought but, I wasn't sure if I could get away with different size's or not.  I guess that I can install files to say like D Drive an run it that way but, wouldn't that make it run slower?  Course, since it is new hardware probably not as bad as if I were trying to do it on a older machine.

[bob1286]

I mite get another 2 TB drive, later on since, that thus far, the case can kind of accommodate it despite the video card.  Would everything like my Key's be all right, Windows Activation and Activated Games?

[camerongray]

I'd still always suggest just having them as separate drives, it'll be no slower than using a single drive.  Using RAID 0 on its own (i.e. split data across 2 disks for capacity and performance) doubles your chance of complete data loss.  The only time I would use RAID is where there is enough redundancy to handle a drive failing with no data loss.

[bob1286]

That mean then I would need 4 additional drives likely, was wanting to replace the case to this unit though

[TheWaffle]

If he takes frequent backups redundancy shouldn't matter.  While he does double his chance of total data loss, with a loss of a single drive, a backup will prevent this.  A gaming machine usually won't have anything mission critical on it (games), so it can probably spare some downtime when one of the drives fail.

What exactly is filling most of your disk space? Can it be downloaded again? Assuming it can.
You could set up 2x2tb drives in raid 0, and use the 1.5tb drive for automated backups of files that couldn't be re-downloaded in the event of a drive failure.