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I’ve got three hard drives different sizes and I want to create a RAID 5. The three drives—all Seagate—are:

  • 1.5 TB
  • 3 TB
  • 700 GB

Is there a way to RAID these or is it possible to do the folloiwng:

  • create 2 x 700 GB Partitions on 1.5 TB drive
  • create 4 x 700 GB Partitions on 3 TB drive
  • create 1 x 700 GB Partition on 700GB drive

And RAID those together?

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You can easily do this on Linux using mdadm. Note, though, that if you go with RAID5 using your 7 partitions, you would still only be able to survive the loss of a single partition. Lose your 1.5 TB drive, for example, and your array is unrecoverable.

If instead, you went with the following:

  • create 2 x 700 GB partitions on 1.5 TB drive
  • create 2 x 700 GB partitions on 3 TB drive, leaving 1.5 TB empty
  • create 1 x 700 GB partition on 700GB drive

and added them together in a RAID6 array, you could survive the loss of any two partitions, thus of any one drive. Your array would be 2100 GB large.

It may also be possible to join your 1.5 TB and 700 GB drive together, perhaps using LVM, then do RAID1 of that and your 3 TB drive. That, too, would buy you about 2100 GB but without the substantial performance hit of RAID6.

There are other approaches, too. Drobo's unRAID for example. Drobo's capacity calculator claims you could have 2.04 TB available for storage with a 750 GB, 1.5 TB, and 3 TB drive, and be able to survive the loss of any single drive. That's pretty similar to either of the other options I outline above. If you are using Windows, I'm not sure what options are available to you.

In general, it's best to go with similarly sized hard drives when RAID'ing them together.

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