Windows 10: RAID 5 Across Hard Drives

Hello,I am building a NAS and I have 1x 8TB HHD and 3x 3TB HHD. Can I set all 4 drives up in RAID 5 even though one drive is 8TB and not 3TB?

:)

 

How do I format a single raid 5 hard drive?

I'd like to know how to format a single former raid 5 hard drive

If I boot up without the other raid 5 drives then Windows doesn't see it; it doesn't appear in Disk Management, or whilst booted into the Windows installation in DOS.

See below for more information on the set up I'm currently running.

I have a HP Proliant N40L Microserver running a raid 5 using Windows 10 Storage Spaces. There are a total of 4 hard drives in the microserver:

• 750gb (Windows 10)
  
• 3 x 2tb Western Digital Green
  

A few days after I set up a raid Windows 10 Storage Spaces flagged one of the hard drives as 'Retired' (unusable). The three Western Digital Green hard drives are brand new. However I replaced the hard drive causing the issue with a new one of exactly the same spec.

The raid rebuilt itself but after a day Windows 10 Storage Spaces flagged it as 'Retired'.

I'm not sure what's causing this issue. All the hard drives on the raid are new, and with the issue happening on a drive I only just replaced, I'm reluctant to blame the hard drives. Most of the components within the Microserver are new - apart from the Microserver itself.

I'd like to format the hard drive and attempt to rebuild the raid again, but Windows does not recognise the drive. If anyone has any advise I'd really appreciate it.

 

Upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 - Raid hard drives now corrupted

I've removed one of my two RAID drives, put it in an external drive case with USB interface and can access it. It strongly suggests to me that the RAID was set to one before and the upgrade to Windows 10 has caused the problem wherein it thinks it's raid
0. So, I've hopefully now copied all of my previously not backed up data to a portable USB hard drive.

My thought was to put the hard drive back into the PC, go back into the bios and cancel the current RAID 0 setting, probably reformat the drives and then reset it to RAID 1. Then copy all of my data back onto it from the portable hard drive. Hopefully
that will work.

 

How to image 2 hard drives with raid 1

Hi there
Not sure if this is the best way but should work.

1) backup data to individual external drives (or whatever -- cloud services etc). For basic data - use ROBOCOPY ,XCOPY, or simply Windows / File explorer.
2) install new HDD's
3) Create your RAID array's for the new drives.
4) restore data saved via step 1).

If you have the Windows OS on a RAID device then that's beyond my knowledge - AFAIK Windows needs a hardware card with a driver to boot a RAID device. However the suggestion I've made will save / recover your DATA files.

Cheers
jimbo.