Well I've been running my small file server for some time, (5 HD's) and considering i have a raid card in there, and its running 4 of the drives i was thinking why not use it for more than just using the drives

Now the drives are spanned so all 5 of them run as one big HD and then i share the spanned drive, well its not that i get really horrible speeds, but I'm planning on striping the drives so i can have a hard copy backup of the whole Spanned drive, now i realize I'm going to have to back the drives up to un-spann them from where they are, but what raid could i use that would give me 2 stripe-able HD partitions, and can i even stripe a raid setup, now the drive are

SATA 160 GB
SATA 250 GB
IDE 300 GB
IDE 250 GB

those will all be on the raid card i have, its an ULI raid card and has 2 sata and a IDE port

now i have about no knowledge of how or what to do when it comes to raid, but I'm really interested in it, cause i plan on doing it with a few other HD soon so any help would be awesome

And a nice how to RAID sticky would be awesome as well, if anyone has the time to make one up

Quote: Now the drives are spanned so all 5 of them run as one big HD and then i share the spanned drive, well its not that i get really horrible speeds, but I'm planning on striping the drives so i can have a hard copy backup of the whole Spanned drive

If you have them spanned, there is no need to backup the whole array for anything other than archive purposes, as the spanning is to provide drive failure protection.

Quote: those will all be on the raid card i have, its an ULI raid card and has 2 sata and a IDE port

Please post the specs of the card and the types or arrays it supports.

Well, there are several RAID posts here, but nothing stickied yet to my knowledge... I'll look into it.

Read this post and associated links for more information http://forums.pcapex.com/other_hardw..._for_next.html

Quote: Originally Posted by Im_gumby If you have them spanned, there is no need to backup the whole array for anything other than archive purposes, as the spanning is to provide drive failure protection. Please post the specs of the card and the types or arrays it supports. Well, there are several RAID posts here, but nothing stickied yet to my knowledge... I'll look into it. Read this post and associated links for more information http://forums.pcapex.com/other_hardw..._for_next.html

thanks for the link, and its a M5283 from uli Linky

now they are spanned but say a drive crashes, or just dies won't i loose the data on that segment
i have the spanned drive near full

Quote: Originally Posted by Gzim, in his Raid how to guide 1. Bang on Neighbor's Door 2. Yell "Open Up! Police!" 3. Break door open... 4. Procede to "raid" neighbor's stuff

Sorry...couldn't help...

Quote: Originally Posted by s1ugh34d thanks for the link, and its a M5283 from uli Linky now they are spanned but say a drive crashes, or just dies won't i loose the data on that segment i have the spanned drive near full

Well, I didn't see any mention of RAID on the card you listed... it just seemed like a card to connect drives to. Am I wrong?

And when you say spanned... please clarifiy. Do you have drive A + drive B = Drive C (JBOD) or do you mean you are running some form of RAID 5? If you are running RAID 5, then no you wouldn't lose data, as the array would repopulate a new drive if the old one died.

Quote: Originally Posted by Im_gumby Well, I didn't see any mention of RAID on the card you listed... it just seemed like a card to connect drives to. Am I wrong? And when you say spanned... please clariify. Do you have drive A + drive B = Drive C (JBOD) or do you mean you are running some form of RAID 5? If you are running RAID 5, then no you wouldn't lose data, as the array would repopulate a new drive if the old one died.

Yea i wasn't sure if it was a RAID card the drivers have a bios menu after the post and before windows loads up

Now my spanned setup is through windows disk management, i have Drive a + Drive b + Drive c = Drive D

I figure if i cant do it with this card ill get a CPU for my gigabyte board, it has raid on it and it'll be faster for running my fileserver anyhow

Quote: Originally Posted by s1ugh34d Yea i wasn't sure if it was a RAID card the drivers have a bios menu after the post and before windows loads up Now my spanned setup is through windows disk management, i have Drive a + Drive b + Drive c = Drive D I figure if i cant do it with this card ill get a CPU for my gigabyte board, it has raid on it and it'll be faster for running my fileserver anyhow

If you have it spanned through windows, then you would lose info if one drive was lost. I would go with the gigabyte board, personally.