RAID advrce sought

I am seeking advice on setting up RAID.
config is
ASUS mb P8Z77-VLK with 16 meg RAM, Core i5 at 3.4 gHZ
D drive id a one TB Western Digital
There are 3 external drives:
2 Fantom GreenDrives at 1.36 TB ea.
1 Silcon Image A80 465 GB

The 2 Fantoms are currently attached vua usb2 although I can use usb3 to attach via the esata interface. I got the Fantoms cheap although the limitation is they only have 2 interfaces: esata and usb2. usb3 can convert to esata and I can live with usb3 speed

The mb supports Intel Rapid Storage which which Intel's RAID solution. I looking to run raid1m mirroring on 2 Fantoms,leaving the A80 aside just for storage.

I have look at Storage Space ( running Win 8, 64 bit).

The intent is use C as the boot drive. Applications are on D. Data would be mirrored on the externals. But that implies having access to the raid drives on a frequent basis. The final version could be raided but during development I could work on files on a daily basis.

Any salient points greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

Welcome to Major Geeks.

To set up RAID, all the drives in the array have to be internal drives connected directly to the motherboard. This is due to the copyright protections built into Windows and other paid software such as MS-Office or Photoshop.

Even if - in theory - you could set up RAID1 through an eSata port, it would not be worth it. If the external drive were unplugged and reconnected, it would trigger the warning that one of the drives had "failed", requiring the RAID1 array to be rebuilt from the internal drive to the external drive - a process that takes several hours and makes the PC unusable during the time the process is running.

You basically have two options:

1. Scrap RAID1 and go with automatic drive imaging software for the external drive such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, or,

2. Purchase a second internal 1TB drive to set up RAID1. If you choose this option, it's best to get the same capacity and series of Western Digital drive (Blue, Green, Black, etc.) as the one that's in there now.

Hope this helps.

 

Sounds like Storage Space is a better option. I don't know if there is room for an additional internal drive. And that would go against the the drive C for Windows, drive D for applications, and the external drives for data. SS can be configured in a raid1 type manner. The only question is access to the data files or if I have to use raid as an archive?