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#11
I picked up a MediaSonic ProBox and put 4 Drives in it , they have Raid and Non-raid versions depending on your needs , several other Companies have similar products , I think I looked at some by Vantec too?
Mediasonic
The simple answer is yes...it's called RAID. In this case software RAID. The other RAID is hardware which you have to buy a RAID card and connect your drives to that then setup the RAID....but hardware RAID is expensive.
I'm using 4 1TB drives as a RAID 0.....I'm not really concerned with data loss do to RAID 0 failing. To use a redundancy depends on the user and what the user intends to do with the RAID....which can fire off a big debate as which way to go.
To set up the RAID, that's done in the BIOS of your mobo.....if your mobo will allow it. It's fairly simple but can be daunting to the novice or first timer. So now when I open up explorer....instead of seeing 4 individual drives, I just see 1 drive at 4TB.
No no....there are 2 types of RAID.....1 is software where you set it up in your BIOS. 2 is hardware which requires special hardware that is expensive.
Yes...if you use a NAS...the RAID is all ready setup...usually vendor specific and all you do is add your HDD's.
No....the easiest and cheapest way is just adding the drives to your case and connecting them to your mobo (provided that the mobo has enough SATA ports) and then set the RAID up in the BIOS.
Check out this video.......This will give you an idea how to.
I have 4 1TB drives in my case connect to my mobo. Then I went into my BIOS for RAID set up.....this is a key combo input to access the RAID set up. In my case (situation) is ctrl+m. Then selected my RAID type, in my case I selected 0, then added my HDD's and that's it.
Just get a 4-6 TB HDD. You can't do RAID with USB external drives, only internal. The only reason to do RAID internally is for performance (RAID 0) or redundancy (RAID 1). sounds ike you need neither so just get a large HDD and put it in an external USB 3.0 enclosure.