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Raid 5.

trickson

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Okay took my 1TB HDD and migrated it into the RAID 0 array. Now I was not sure what to expect and I still do not know what I gained. First off now all I see is C: as being 931GB I though for sure at the very least I would get like 1.5TB WTF? It is like all I have now is one fucking HDD. No extra space nothing. I need more space and speed not loose the shit! Any way to revert back to raid 0 or am I just fucked and have to reinstall. What would you do? Should I just leave it till I get another 1TB? Or is there a way to get some space out of this other than loosing 1TB of space? Fuck I am pissed I hate being so fucking dumb and trying things. I read about it and it said nothing about loosing fucking HDD space!
 

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What exactly is the current configuration?

From what I can gather you had two 500GB drives in RAID0 and added the 1TB drive to make it a RAID5, is that correct?

If that is the case the total usable space is going to be 1000GB, there isn't anything you can do. When you do a RAID with different size drives, the system will limit all the drives to the size of the smallest drive in the array. So 500GB+500GB+1000GB means that you will only be able to use 500GB of space on the 1000GB drive. So the system sees it as 500GB+500GB+500GB, the extra 500GB of space on the 1000GB drive is unusable.

Also, with RAID5 you lose 1 drives worth of space because that space is used to store the parity data to add redundancy. That means in a RAID5 with 3 500GB drives the total usable space is 1000GB.

I don't know if it is possible to go back to RAID0 directly from RAID5. However, you might be able to migrate to a JBOD array. JBOD groups all the drives together and makes one big storage space. This would give you 2000GB of usable space, but no redundancy and no real performance improvement over a single drive.
 

trickson

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What exactly is the current configuration?

From what I can gather you had two 500GB drives in RAID0 and added the 1TB drive to make it a RAID5, is that correct?

If that is the case the total usable space is going to be 1000GB, there isn't anything you can do. When you do a RAID with different size drives, the system will limit all the drives to the size of the smallest drive in the array. So 500GB+500GB+1000GB means that you will only be able to use 500GB of space on the 1000GB drive. So the system sees it as 500GB+500GB+500GB, the extra 500GB of space on the 1000GB drive is unusable.

Also, with RAID5 you lose 1 drives worth of space because that space is used to store the parity data to add redundancy. That means in a RAID5 with 3 500GB drives the total usable space is 1000GB.

I don't know if it is possible to go back to RAID0 directly from RAID5. However, you might be able to migrate to a JBOD array. JBOD groups all the drives together and makes one big storage space. This would give you 2000GB of usable space, but no redundancy and no real performance improvement over a single drive.

You are correct in the configuration. I will try that. I rally do not care about performance as really there is very little to gain from raid 0 over a single drive any way other than more space. And that is really all I am looking for.
I would like to just add another 1TB hard drive now if I do this will I see 2TB of space then? the config is like this 2x500gb HDD's + 1 TB HDD. SO if I add one more to this array it will start to add up then? I like the fact that raid 5 has some speed and some redundancy for any unexpected power failures or other problems that is for sure.
 
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trickson

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SO can any one tell me more?
 

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SO can any one tell me more?

Hate to be the dick but, research what you're doing before you do it. I don't have sympathy for people who don't attempt to find out what they're doing before they do it.

In the end, what is your goal? Did you just want the drives to show up as one big drive or did you want redundancy? If you don't use the chipset RAID and you use Windows RAID instead, you can do software RAID which can use a 500Gb portion for RAID while leaving the other 500Gb available. By using the chipset you're dedicating the drive to RAID, so you'll lose space unless you use JBOD which, IMHO, is just a bad idea but that is just me.
 

trickson

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Hate to be the dick but, research what you're doing before you do it. I don't have sympathy for people who don't attempt to find out what they're doing before they do it.

In the end, what is your goal? Did you just want the drives to show up as one big drive or did you want redundancy? If you don't use the chipset RAID and you use Windows RAID instead, you can do software RAID which can use a 500Gb portion for RAID while leaving the other 500Gb available. By using the chipset you're dedicating the drive to RAID, so you'll lose space unless you use JBOD which, IMHO, is just a bad idea but that is just me.

Not sure to thank you of tell you off.

I wanted redundancy with added space, I can see that I need to add more drives is all raid 5 is great. I haven't used any thing but raid 0 for like 6 years now. So Some things need to be asked and your comment in the beginning is kinda fucked dude. I mean I know some about the shit or it would not work now would it?
 

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I would like to just add another 1TB hard drive now if I do this will I see 2TB of space then? the config is like this 2x500gb HDD's 1 TB HDD. SO if I add one more to this array it will start to add up then? I like the fact that raid 5 has some speed and some redundancy for any unexpected power failures or other problems that is for sure.

If you add another 1TB drive to the RAID5 array your total usable space would be 1.5TB. It doesn't matter what combination of drives you have, RAID always takes the smallest drive and limits all the drives in the array to that size. RAID0,1, and 5 all do it this way. So any drive you add will be seen as a 500GB drive in your setup.
 

trickson

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If you add another 1TB drive to the RAID5 array your total usable space would be 1.5TB. It doesn't matter what combination of drives you have, RAID always takes the smallest drive and limits all the drives in the array to that size. RAID0,1, and 5 all do it this way. So any drive you add will be seen as a 500GB drive in your setup.

Okay thanks that is what I wanted to know. :respect:
 
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Aquinus

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Not sure to thank you of tell you off.

I wanted redundancy with added space, I can see that I need to add more drives is all raid 5 is great. I haven't used any thing but raid 0 for like 6 years now. So Some things need to be asked and your comment in the beginning is kinda fucked dude. I mean I know some about the shit or it would not work now would it?

Feel free to tell me off but you're the one asking questions and just put different sized drives in RAID-5 where just about any resource will tell you that your going to lose space, so the fact your got pissed off about it means you didn't know enough, that's my point and before you start messing with storage, it's a good idea to read up all you can get. So I'm being an ass because it looks like you did minimal research. Just because you can click a button that says, "Convert raid," doesn't mean that you know what you're doing. The simple fact that you expect more than 1TB in the first place shows that you didn't so don't be an ass to me because it doesn't appear that you knew what you were doing. (Your first post also gives a good sense of that considering the amount of cussing and anger in your initial post is staggering while expecting 1.5TB.)

All in all, I wouldn't keep them in RAID. You're wasting the space of the 1TB drive. If you really want to run any raid level it's optimal to make sure that all the drive are the same size. That way performance, capacity, and reliability should be about the same for all of your drives.

Personally I would get another 500Gb drive for RAID-5 and I would use the 1TB as a backup, considering capacity wise 3x 500Gb in RAID-5 gives you the same capacity as a 1TB drive.

If you add another 1TB drive to the RAID5 array your total usable space would be 1.5TB. It doesn't matter what combination of drives you have, RAID always takes the smallest drive and limits all the drives in the array to that size. RAID0,1, and 5 all do it this way. So any drive you add will be seen as a 500GB drive in your setup.

Thanks Newtekie, you did an excellent job of explaining this but it's safe to say that the RAID will take the smallest drive size in any array for any RAID level except for JBOD mode, which really isn't a RAID level.
 

trickson

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Just added 1 more 500GB HDD's to my Raid 5 array adding the last one now.

LOL I just seen this I have 5 HDD's and they are in raid 5.
 

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trickson

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Okay this is what I have now. I want to know some things now before I mess things up.
Okay in this screenshot of computer management I can see that there is 931.51GB of Unallocated space. Now this is my question what do I do with this space? I can see that since I added 2 more 500GB drives that the space has increased on the array but as you can see windows is still not showing any more free space. So some help is very well need, Thank you all. :respect:
 

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trickson

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Sweet! I did it!
1.81TB!!!!
 

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newtekie1

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Excellent. I assume you figured out to just expand the volume to the unallocated space.
 

trickson

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Excellent. I assume you figured out to just expand the volume to the unallocated space.

Yeah! I was kinda scared and all but I just clicked and did it. LOOKS GREAT NOW!!!!
 

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Geekoid

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Just to add - don't forget those backups! Even if you do have that 1 redundant drive. If, heaven forbid, you lose a drive while you're RAID is rebuilding from a failure then you'll lose it all.
 

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Just to add - don't forget those backups! Even if you do have that 1 redundant drive. If, heaven forbid, you lose a drive while you're RAID is rebuilding from a failure then you'll lose it all.

This. It's even more likely that hard drives from the same batch might go at the same time as well. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend a 2TB drive so you can have a clone of your RAID, external or internal, it really doesn't matter.

Some will argue then that a rotated off site backup is also useful but one step at a time. :p
 

trickson

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Yeah I have a full system image and full system back up. I always have a full system back always!
 
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