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I'm going to be setting up a Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise OS on an old (but powerful) Dell XPS PC. I will then be running Ubuntu Server on top of it using VirtualBox. I need to have redundancy on the Ubuntu Server (not as important for the Win10 host install, although it would be preferable). The computer will have 3 HD's - 2 x 8 TB and 1 x 10 TB. My question though is what is the best way to go about getting that redundancy to avoid any performance decrease/loss on the Ubuntu server?

I think the Dell XPS has fakeRAID (although not certain of this), so I could just use that and let the host OS handle the redundancy (and use the 10 TB drive as a backup/spare). Alternatively (or if it doesn't have fakeRAID), I could use Windows Storage Spaces (would probably need to use the 10 TB as a boot drive and the 2 x 8 TB for Windows Storage Spaces). Or I could set up two virtual drives (one on each of the 8 TB drives) and use mdadm to get software RAID directly on the Ubuntu server.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks!

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    RAID0, 1 10 are really the only RAIDs that can increase performance, RAID1 should give you increased read performance, but no change in write. Any kind of parity RAID, i.e. 5, 6, will reduce performance, but you don't want RAID5 for 3 disks that are over 1TB. I'd set up a RAID1 for the two 8TBs. If your data is important, you'd want to go with a real RAID card for Windows, or move the host OS to Linux and use software RAID. FakeRAID + Windows = eventual data loss. Also, remember RAID is not a backup, you still want backups for important data. Vbox is not a server VM solution.
    – essjae
    Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 23:43

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You can ignore the extra 2tb on the 10tb drive and treat them like 4 gtb drives.

If you don't have raid hardware (and maybe even if you do), you will likely do best configuring this as raid10. This will give you about 16tb of space, providing full redundancy and stripe the data over the RAID 1 to give you better performance then RAID1 and redundancy not available in RAID0

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