Western Digital Mirror Edition/Raid Question

[dafoe]

I have a 2tb Mirror Edition. I don't know much about RAID. But I'm guessing this can't be done because I couldn't find anything on google.

What I would like to do is replace the two one TB drives with two 4 TB drives giving me an 8TB external. Is this possible? Any usb raid enclosures are completely unreasonable price wise.

Like I said, I know nothing about RAID. But I don't understand the price structure of the enclosures. Why does it matter what size hard drives these enclosures hold. What difference does it make?

[Cornucopia]

Unless you're talking USB 3.0, the idea of using USB for RAID is self-defeating (at least performance-wise, if not security-wise).

What kind of RAID are you wanting, and why?

1. Raid 0 (aka Striping): 2 x 2tb drives = 1 x 4tb Raid drive, at double the read/write speed (but NO failsafe fallback at all)
2. Raid 1 (aka Mirroring): 2 x 2tb drives = 1 x 2tb Raid drive, at slightly less than normal write speeds, but slightly less than 2x read speeds, and FULL failsafe fallback
3... Raids 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 (Striping w/ Parity): 3 or 4 or 5 etc drives = 1 Raid drive (size varies), at improved speeds and Near-full failsafe fallback (but some/much delay in "rebuild time")
4...Raids 1+0 or 0+1 (aka Raid 10, Striping w/Mirroring): 4x 2tb drives = 1x 4tb Raid drive with the benefits of 1 & 2 above
5. Spanning (no real raid #): 2x 2tb drives = 1x 4tb Spanned drive, no benefit other than it looks like only 1 larger drive to the OS
6. JBOD (aka Just-a-bunch-of-discs): 2x 2tb drives = 2x 2tb drives. No difference, but comes in handy when doing audio multitrack editing (with media in round-robin fashion), or when doing video conversion (puts less stress & timing constraints on drive if going from A to B as opposed to A to A or B to B.

In a perfect world, size of the enclosure shouldn't matter, but maybe it does with their models, in which case that's probably not for you.

I could tell you more about how to set up eSata very nicely for Software RAID in WinXP, Vista, Win7, Linux, etc, but I'd need to know the answer above first to give you the right advice...

Scott

[jman98]

Larger drives may not be fully tested/supported by some RAID manufacturers. If they say they don't support it, I would not advise that you use it.

Do note that creating one large 8 TB virtual drive out of two 4 TB drives means that if either drive fails, you lose EVERYTHING on BOTH drives. That is unless you want to pay someone to do data recovery for you. And I want to point out that while this is not likely, it's also not impossible either. In unusual but possible worst case scenarios, I've personally seen a 2 disk mirrored system lose BOTH disks when the 1st drive died and the 2nd one idiotically copied the bad drive to itself. That was some years ago, but it happened at work. I have also read about a guy who had a 3 disk RAID (striping) system where he lost EVERYTHING when the following happened - drive 1 fails and is replaced. During the rebuild, drive 2 also fails catastrophically. Data = gone. He had an offsite backup he was able to use to get his stuff back, otherwise he would have lost everything permanently.

[dafoe]

Thanks for the replies.

A few years ago I started moving everything I own, all physical media, to usb hard drives. The problem is, I don't own any drives over 2TB And most of my collections are bigger than that. One of my collections is at least 6TB and growing. I'm just sick of having to search through multiple drives to find what I want.

What I will probably end doing is replacing all my drives with 4TB drives, connecting them to my PC and creating a folder with shortcuts to everything. I am a cheap bastard. I wouldn't mind spending a few bucks on a raid system. But not hundreds or thousands. Again, I really dont understand the prices. Wether it's a 2tb system or a 32tb system It's still just an enclosure with a raid controller. I really don't get it. Obviously there is something I'm missing.

My MB doesn't have usb 3.0. But I assume I can buy a card for that. Just bought my fist 3.0 drive today. I'm a little nervous about it being a Seagate, but it was $140 at Staples with a coupon. Which was an ok deal. So maybe I will look into a card.

Getting back to raid, I'm not looking to back up my data. I know that sounds stupid. If it's not worth backing up, then why are you saving it? I'm just too cheap to double the cost of my hard drives. Especially with the post flooding price hikes. Yes it would suck if I lost 2tb of data. But it's just data. I would get over it.

I just want all my stuff to be in one place. At least by type. So I'm not so much interested in performance as I am being able to organize everything into one drive.

The other concern I have is I do seem to hear a lot about raid failure in researching this. I'm wondering if the drives are failing or if it's the actual raid controller causing the problem in most of these cases.

Anyway, I do appreciate the feedback. Thanks guys.