Setting up multiple RAID arrays.

General Computing Hardware & Networking
1

Not had much of a chance to play with this before, but I have set up RAID arrays on a single machine as part of my job as a Dell engineer, i.e. 2 drives in RAID 0, etc.

RAID 1 will give the best advantage for safety in the short term for the two drives I’m intending to install, but if I wanted to add an additional 2tb of storage later on again in RAID1, I guess I would have to set up a second array?

Something like this for 4x2tb drives:

Voume 1: 2x2tb drives in RAID1 (as a boot drive and initial storage)
Volume 2: 2x2tb drives in RAID1 (as additional storage)

The only distinction between the 2 being the volume name. Is that correct or is there something else I need to do as well? Also is there some special naming convention I need to know about as well or can I call the arrays anything I want?

If I wanted to add an SSD into the mix as a boot drive (drive “C”) and keep the initial 2x2tb hard drive as just data storage (drive “D”), what is the best way to set this up?(the SSD doesn’t need to be RAIDed and I can use Acronis True Image to rebuild it if the drive fails)

Any help would be gratefully received.

2

The latter arrangement is more or less what I have in my main box. I use a single SSD as boot drive. Then I add storage hard disks in pairs, mirrored. Currently there’s 2x2TB and 2x3TB in there. I’m using Windows software raid so as to remove the quirks of motherboard RAID solutions and make it more transportable between systems which may not use the same controller. It also leaves each drive exposed if you want to monitor them individually.