What Can I Do With All These Hdds?!

Hi all,

I'm upgrading my mobo from an old 2008 model to an AS-Rock FM2A78M PRO3+, wiith 6 SATA connectors

I have Win7 64bit running on a 60GB SSD, and the following HDDs available to me:

2x 3.5" Seagate 500GB HDD
2x 3.5" WD 1TB HDD
1x 2.5" Seagate 250GB HDD

I'd like to use this PC for storing & serving my music, photos and movies etc, with some level of redundancy, and also maybe using my external 2TB HDD for backups.

I'm thinking of creating a RAID array with the available HDDs listed above, but I'm a noob to RAID, and wanted to see if there's any ideas out there of how I can get the most space out of the hardware available.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

 

Take the old hardware and make a FreeNAS box. With all the drives of different sizes you could make a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) - no redundancy, but you get one drive with the combined size of all disks. As_Rock has a RAID manual for download. Somewhere around 3.5TB, but the space all those drives need and connectors you can buy a 4TB drive.

 

Nice idea, thanks, but I need just a bunch of Windows software running on it too!