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I know it seems silly, but I really want my four 1TB drives to be mirrored (running my own subversion server for development). Is there anything wrong with building two raid1 arrays on my 'SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 4 Port RAID 0/1/5/10 JBOD Card' raid controller, then mirroring those two logical drives in windows 7?

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  • Why not just build a 4-disk RAID-1? Or does that controller not support it? Oct 15, 2011 at 18:43
  • Unfortunately not. At least not the syba card or my intel raid controller built into mobo Oct 15, 2011 at 18:46
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    Which then likely is not a raid controller but a fake controller so that the processor ends up doing the work anyway.
    – TomTom
    Oct 15, 2011 at 19:34
  • What is the underlying reason for wanting a 4-disk mirror? I can envision common scenarios (e.g. HA clusters) wherein you easily could have 4 disks (in 2 separate mirrors) containing essentially the same data, but I am failing to see the real-world benefit of a 4-way mirror on a single host. The risk of 3 disks failing successively is far smaller than the risk of data corruption compromising the entire array.
    – Skyhawk
    Oct 15, 2011 at 21:02

1 Answer 1

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Do you really want the data on one drive mirrored across three other drives?

Would RAID 1+0 work for you instead? This would tolerate the failure of two drives once they weren't from the same mirror set. If your controller supports RAID6 this will tolerate the failure of any two drives.

In answer to your question, your suggested set up sounds like it might be difficult to troubleshoot in the event of a drive failure. Personally I would not prefer it to two RAID 1s or a single RAID 10 set.

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  • I've been through losing the wrong two on raid 1+0 before :( Oct 15, 2011 at 20:48
  • I suppose I'll just do two raid 1 and auto-backup subversion data from one to the other Oct 15, 2011 at 20:49

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