RAID drives externally?

[patseguin Global Moderator]

I’m finishing my new build and this motherboard doesn’t have enough SATA ports for me. I had 3 sata ssd’s and 2 2GB hard drives in a raid to me a 4TB volume. Is there a way to use these externally since since they are for rarely used data anyways? I’m looking at some dual bay external enclosures that have JBOD mode. Could I put the 2 drives in there in that mode and Windows will detect them as the 4TB raid volume?

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

Oh,@BudMan !

[+BudMan MVC]

On 25/11/2022 at 10:46, patseguin said:

Windows will detect them as the 4TB raid volume?

highly unlikely - were they raided before in windows? So 2x 2TB for a 4TB raid - so this was a raid zero you setup how before?  Or you looking to raid 0 them in windows?  Highly doubtful you gain any advantage of raid0 if they are just connected with usb.

If your looking to pool drives together with windows, your best option is prob drive pool from stablebit.  It allows you to pool together drives - and yeah they can be usb connected.. I do this for some drives I have in a enclosure..  You can have multiple copies of folders or files on multiple disks for redundancy if single drive failure.  The drives can be different sizes.  And nice thing is - you don't loose anything that was on the drives before.  And you can always take them out and connect them to some other system and still access the files.

 

[theefool]

Windows Storage Space is another option:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/storage-spaces-in-windows-b6c8b540-b8d8-fb8a-e7ab-4a75ba11f9f2

But, Stablebit DrivePool looks to be better.

[Sulphy]

So, i managed to bag myself a 10 bay USB JBOD enclosure some time ago, and have it populated with random sized drives, and use it mainly as a backup, of a backup of a backup!

For software raid, i tend to use Drive Bender .... works like a charm! Just dont expect great performance... I tend to power it on, and backup to it every few months or so.

[patseguin Global Moderator]

On 25/11/2022 at 19:17, BudMan said:

highly unlikely - were they raided before in windows? So 2x 2TB for a 4TB raid - so this was a raid zero you setup how before?  Or you looking to raid 0 them in windows?  Highly doubtful you gain any advantage of raid0 if they are just connected with usb.

If your looking to pool drives together with windows, your best option is prob drive pool from stablebit.  It allows you to pool together drives - and yeah they can be usb connected.. I do this for some drives I have in a enclosure..  You can have multiple copies of folders or files on multiple disks for redundancy if single drive failure.  The drives can be different sizes.  And nice thing is - you don't loose anything that was on the drives before.  And you can always take them out and connect them to some other system and still access the files.

 

They were just RAID'd in Windows to get a 4TB volume. I don't even want to keep them, I want to get the files off and copy them to an internal SSD. I thought maybe if I bought an external enclosure and used JBOD mode, Windows would see them as the RAID volume it created.

[+BudMan MVC]

Find it highly unlikely - now with the stablebit.. Sure you can move them to another pac and it would see your pool again if you have the stablebit software installed - if not, it just a ntfs drive and your files are there..