Over the last couple of months I’ve been using a hack to allow software RAID 5 on Windows XP. This hack has worked great for the few months I’ve used it, but I have found a two key features missing from Windows XP’s implementation of software RAID. The first missing feature is the ability to add a hard drive to an existing RAID 5 array. The second missing feature is the ability to make different RAID setups appear as one drive. For example, let’s say I have three 500gb hard drives in a RAID 5 and two 250gb hard drives in a RAID 1. I would like the ability to make these two different arrays function as one big drive. After a little bit of research, I’ve found that Linux is the solution to my problem. Also, I’ve found that Linux has support for software RAID 6 and RAID 10, a nice bonus if users are looking for increased fault tolerance or increased speed. Although RAID on Linux was a little bit tough to set up, because I’m not used to Linux and because Linux developers aren’t the best with GUI’s, I eventually worked it out.

Step #1 Pick the desired RAID and get the needed hardware.

The first step is to decide on the type of RAID. Go to my article on simple RAID level explanations to find out the differences between the different levels or RAID. Once the desired RAID level is picked, it’s time to move onto hardware. The amount and size of hard drives needed to achieve the desired setup needs to be figured out. When deciding how many hard drives will be needed keep in mind that one hard drive of 10gb or more will be needed to accommodate the OS. Also, linux should run on almost any motherboard, CPU and Video Card combination.

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