Question: I have a load of old external USB hard drives lying around – as I’m sure an increasing number of others do also.
Is there any way I can utilize these to act in some kind of RAID-type system?
Seems a waste to have all that storage lying around in uneven and relatively small chunks.
I’m using Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.
Answer: Been hunting around the net after the tip from KovBal about dynamic disks – and came across this thread.
Basically, RAID using external USB hard drives doesn’t look too achievable.
One quote here.
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Using USB as the transfer technology ?you’re only going to achieve a ?30-Megabyte or less transfer rate. You ?seem to be going to a lot of effort ?for a marginal result. For external ?use, eSATA is a much better choice for ?performance.
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Maybe I don’t understand the intent, ?but having 3 USB external drives ?working as a single “Dynamic” volume ?is almost certainly going to saturate ?the Hubs/Controller they are on.
And another quote here.
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The overhead of software RAID will ?probably cause problems on USB drives. ?Even if you get it working I think it ?will probably be flaky and error ?prone. You can buy USB enclosures that ?you can install multiple drives in. ?These enclosures use an embedded Linux ?so that you can then setup a RAID ?array. This way the RAID calculations ?and read/writes are all done outside ?of Windows. The interface can be USB, ?SCSI, eSATA, LAN, whatever, it makes ?no difference. Software RAID is a ?compromise at best. I don’t believe ?RAID 5 is supported in Vista in any ?case. I would look for a different way ?to achieve your goal.