Adding a second SATA array

[Jeremy Garchow]

I don’t think you can stripe together two raids of unequal value and have the sum of the individual raids equal the sum of the usable space. The raids need to be of the same size or when you stripe the set, the total usable space will be curtailed. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that’s how it’ll work. If you do what you want to do, you will only get another partition that’s the size of the smallest partition, so your 2TB RAID will become a 1 TB RAID when you stripe it together with the other 1TB RAID. You could have both raids on your system that aren’t striped together (if you have port multiplying hardware). That would work. Or either upgrade the drives in your current array for a total of 2TB (which would be 4TB when striping those two together) or buy the same size drives in your second array so it also equals 1TB (which would equal 2TB).

With all those drives, does your SATA card offer raid protection?

[Gary Adcock]

[JeremyG] “I don’t think you can stripe together two raids of unequal value and have the sum of the individual raids equal the sum of the usable space”

correct.

all drives need to be the same volume size, or it will not raid.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Brian Tetamore]

That’s what I thought. I’ll check with Sonnet on RAID protection. I have the Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 8 card.

I appreciate the responses.

[Bob Zelin]

I have the Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 8 card

REPLY –
this does not make sense to me. Is this the OLD 8 port Sonnet Tempo X card (with 8 seperate connectors on it). If I were you, and you like Sonnet, I would get a Sonnet X4P port multipler SATA card, and stick your drives in a port multipler chassis. You have the Kano Technologies chassis, which is the ProMax Chassis (or the PDE chassis). Kano (ProMax) makes a very nice port multiplier chassis that works very well with the Sonnet X4P. Then you can have up to 5 drives in one box, with one single cable, and add a new chassis onto another port on the X4P card (there are 4 ports that can run 5 drives each port). Each box can be “Raided” together seperately (RAID 0). You will not combine the multiple boxes – there is no need to do this.

Bob Zelin

[Szumlins]

If added bandwidth isn’t important, you can add drives by doing a concatenated disk set. This allows you to add unequal drive sizes together, but does not provide ANY bandwidth improvement over a single drive.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I always wondered about this. So if you have a 1TB Raid0 and a 2TB Raid0, then you set them up concatenated, that mens you have a virtual disk that’s 3TB, but 1TB is running at it’s Raid0 speed and the 2TB is running at it’s Raid0 speed? It doesn’t work like that does it, or does it? I know it basically striped them in line, so you fill up the one disk then it goes linear to the other. Right?

[Szumlins]

It would be a little odd, but you could do it.

Problem here is that you’d have the speed of array A until it is full, and then the speed of array B since they likely wouldn’t be uniform. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it would work.