You cannot run that configuration.

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@Ledswinger wrote:

Your options are RAID0 (striped) on your 160s, and use the 320 as a separate drive, or three separate disks.  I haven't checked the 720 controller spec, but I guess that it doesn't support JBOD, but with a new PCI controller card you could have all the disks set up as JBOD, so they'd appear as one disk if so desired, but I don't think that JBOD supports striping.

 

You could probably set up the drives as you say you want, by setting the 160s up as RAID0 array controlled by the motherboard RAID controller, giving you a 320Gb array, and a 320Gb disk, and then using Windows to create a software RAID1 array between the two.  I doubt that will work with a Linux partition, but it may be worth a thought. 

 

However, why bother?  The dangers of RAID0 (double the risk of failure of a single disk, because either disk failing causes loss of the whole array) are overstated, because the risk of HDD failure is typically around 0.4% per year, and for most of us the move from 0.4% to 0.8% is not going to be noticeable - the main risk to most machines is not HDD failure, but the user (certainly so in my case).

 

Unfortunately, although the risks are overstated, so are the benefits.  I thought my XPS410 with RAID0 was lightning fast to load when I bought it, but in all honesty it doesn't seem any faster than my son's Inspiron 530 with a single disk.  A quick bit of web browsing finds quite a lot of everyday measurements that show no material speed benefit for RAID0 over a single disk.  The data security benefits of RAID1 are also overstated - user error, malware, fire, flood, or electrical failure are all likely to affect both RAID1 disks, so you still need some form of data backup strategy if you have things you don't want to risk losing.

 

So my take is that there's few upsides or downsides to RAID, other than that it is a relatively complicated setup.  It has benefits in a server environment, but for any future home machine I wouldn't opt for RAID, equally I'm not sufficiently concerned to reload my 410 array as two non RAID disks.

 

Regards,

 

Led

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Thanks Ledswinger, for that very informative information. I would agree with most of what you advised. I use Raid0 in a home system and have for over 15 years in about 10 different systems and never had one issue with Raid.

 

I also have never had a hard drive to fail in nearly 30 years of computing. I have had many drives to get corrupted that I had to recover, and not the data, but the firmware and that sort of issue. This is not the norm though.

 

I do notice a performance boost with Raid, but it may be my inner self telling me that, more than reality. Setting up a stable Raid system can be a challenge, even for me at times, depending on the system, but for me it is worth it. For others it may not be.

 

If someone wants to learn, then dive in, but if it is a system that is used daily while you experiment, I would discourage it.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Your options are RAID0 (striped) on your 160s, and use the 320 as a separate drive, or three separate disks.  I haven't checked the 720 controller spec, but I guess that it doesn't support JBOD, but with a new PCI controller card you could have all the disks set up as JBOD, so they'd appear as one disk if so desired, but I don't think that JBOD supports striping.

 

You could probably set up the drives as you say you want, by setting the 160s up as RAID0 array controlled by the motherboard RAID controller, giving you a 320Gb array, and a 320Gb disk, and then using Windows to create a software RAID1 array between the two.  I doubt that will work with a Linux partition, but it may be worth a thought. 

 

However, why bother?  The dangers of RAID0 (double the risk of failure of a single disk, because either disk failing causes loss of the whole array) are overstated, because the risk of HDD failure is typically around 0.4% per year, and for most of us the move from 0.4% to 0.8% is not going to be noticeable - the main risk to most machines is not HDD failure, but the user (certainly so in my case).

 

Unfortunately, although the risks are overstated, so are the benefits.  I thought my XPS410 with RAID0 was lightning fast to load when I bought it, but in all honesty it doesn't seem any faster than my son's Inspiron 530 with a single disk.  A quick bit of web browsing finds quite a lot of everyday measurements that show no material speed benefit for RAID0 over a single disk.  The data security benefits of RAID1 are also overstated - user error, malware, fire, flood, or electrical failure are all likely to affect both RAID1 disks, so you still need some form of data backup strategy if you have things you don't want to risk losing.

 

So my take is that there's few upsides or downsides to RAID, other than that it is a relatively complicated setup.  It has benefits in a server environment, but for any future home machine I wouldn't opt for RAID, equally I'm not sufficiently concerned to reload my 410 array as two non RAID disks.

 

Regards,

 

Led