Raid+windows mirroring

I recently had some raid problems when my 2 drives suddently dropped out of raid 0.
I was able to restore my files but got me thinking about my backups.

I still want raid 0 because of its speed and I do not want any trouble is disks srop out of raid and become non-raid members.

of using 2 disks for raid 0
and a third disk that I can use to windows mirror a partition.

so if I do loose my raid I still have a disk that I can just use as backup.


any ideas on this solution? Maybe performance impact?

I'm no RAID expert, but I have had a drive drop out of the array before. I had heart failure because I was a bad boy & didn't have a backup! However, I was able to go into the RAID BIOS and just add the drive back and everything picked right back up.

As for your proposed solution, it would depend on if your controller supported that configuration. @ disks in a RAID 0 volume then that volume + one other in RAID 1.

As for the performance, I would think that you'de be slowed down by the single drive because the RAID controller has to write to the RAID 0 array and the single drive to mirror. You might not see too big of a hit because of caching, but at some point the cache will run out and you'll be doing direct writed and waiting on those.

If you want redundancy plus speed I think the best way to go would be RAID 5, but not 100% certain if that is your best choice.

I want the benefits of raid 0, but I don't want to spent hours recovering files if drives drop out of the raid. I do not care about my windows, only about my data. Raid 5 builds a parity disk. but if all drives drop out I still need to recover.

even raid 10. 4 drives that work in raid 0+1,