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That's what RAID is for, but beware that what you're asking for is VERY dangerous, especially with that many drives. You're talking about a striped RAID across 5 disks...I wouldn't expect that to last any longer than 1-2 years before a drive fails and the ENTIRE array is lost.
There are many types of RAID out there: 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60 are the big ones. For your setup, I wouldn't hesitate to set up either two RAID5 arrays of 8TB each, or one RAID6 array that's 16TB. I would not consider a pair of RAID0 (striped) arrays as a realistic possibility for even a second, the risks are too great.
Last edited by suicidaleggroll; 02-22-2012 at 09:59 PM.
That's exactly what RAID is. Multiple drives working together to present as a single partition/filesystem to the OS. What you're asking about is RAID0, even if you don't think you are. RAID0 is a striped RAID, meaning there is no redundancy. You get a single partition/filesystem who's size is the sum of all of the drives in the array (10TB if you're using 5 2TB drives). Anything that is written to the array (the single partition that the OS sees) is split among all of the drives (20% goes to drive A, 20% to drive B, 20% to drive C, etc). This makes RAID0 very fast, but also very unstable, because if any of the drives in the array decides to die, you lose everything on the entire array.
You might not think you're asking about RAID, but you are. I would highly recommend you go with a pair of RAID5 arrays instead. You'll lose the capacity of 1 drive per array (you'll get 8TB out of 5 2TB drives), but the array will be fully redundant. This means that if at any time any of the drives in your array decides to stop working, you lose nothing. All you have to do is replace the failed drive, the RAID will rebuild itself, and you'll have redundancy again within a day, without losing a single file. You'll also be able to use the system the entire time, both with the failed drive and while rebuilding.
Last edited by suicidaleggroll; 02-23-2012 at 05:11 PM.
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