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Looking to set up a photography PC slash storage. Below is my disk drives

  • 500GB SATA Barracuda
  • 2.0TB SATA Western
  • 2.0TB SATA Western
  • 500GB ePCI NVMN --- use this as the PC

It occured to me, if I partition the 2TB in 4x500GB, and same for the second one, I have 9 500GB partitions. Allowing Raid with 3 partions (one from each drive)

My Question is: the remaining 1.5TB in 500GB chunks on each drive (so 3TB total) - can I then use this as per normal, as in not part of the RAID setup?

EDIT: Raid Mirror if it was just the 500GB x 3, so mirror and have an extra redundancy drive?

Open to Striping two of the 3, but as I understand it, that would get me 2x speed accessing 500GB across three drives, but zero redundancy, in fact higher risk of data loss if one of the two Western HDD failed. Then Mirror the pair striped, to the Barracuda for redundancy

EDIT#2: Windows 10 System - https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2s9nyg

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    What type of RAID are we talking about? You should edit your question instead of submitting a comment. What word is "aprt" suppose to be?
    – Ramhound
    Commented Dec 5, 2023 at 21:24
  • Hardware RAID generally only supports entire disks, not individual partitions. Software RAID can support partitions, but note that the throughput of the entire disk must be taken into account. For this reason, the details of your OS and other system details are necessary to begin giving you good answers.
    – music2myear
    Commented Dec 5, 2023 at 21:33
  • music2myear - whats the drawback to doing it software wise? My intentions is to have everything im working on say in Lightroom, on the 500GB ePCI drive . The 3x 500GB partitions would be where I archive or keep things long term. So not too much read and write , thats why i was hoping the remaining 2 x 1.5TB could be for regular use?
    – Manualphotog
    Commented Dec 5, 2023 at 21:56
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    Why do you want to have a RAID array? doing it cheap can actually make your data more vulnerable to loss than single disk architectures. consider that if you did create a nine volume raid, if one of your 2TB disks fails, that would take down 4 of the RAID volumes, which is I believe beyond the rebuildable limit. its unlikely that just one partition on the disk would "go bad". cheap controllers can lose their logical volumes leading to a complete data loss in the worst case, without even suffering a single failed disk. consider your backups carefully. raid is not a replacement.
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Dec 5, 2023 at 23:19
  • yes, i want to stripe the 500GB on each 2TB and then mirror to the barracuda 500gb . So the Barracude 500GB SATA is reliable , I then have 2X the read speed to the "original" 500GB (striped across two 2TB drives). My Question is can I then use the remain 3TB (or 6 x 500GB partitions - 3 on each 2TB drive) as normal HDD space. I dont intend to RAID all 9 partitions
    – Manualphotog
    Commented Dec 6, 2023 at 0:30

1 Answer 1

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Forget RAID and calculating and matching partition sizes exactly, and "what happens with the extra space." Just use a Windows Storage Space (like a Linux LVM), it doesn't care that much about the drive sizes and will figure it all out for you. And it's got options for redundancy too.

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