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Before you go say that RAID 1 mirrors one drive and cannot mirror twice, that's not what I mean.

I have a WD Black 2 TB HDD and 2 WD Blue 1 TB HDD. The WD Black is to be the main drive, and I need data redundancy. Is it possible to use the two blues coupled together as RAID drives and the black as the main drive?

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Before you go say that RAID 1 mirrors one drive and cannot mirror twice, that is not what I mean.

Actually it can, though then it is often called RAID 1E.

I have a WD Black 2 TB HDD and 2 WD Blue 1 TB HDD. The WD Black is to be the main drive, and I need data redundancy. Is it possible to use the two blues coupled together as RAID drives and the black as the main drive?

You can do this in several ways:

  1. Stripe (RAID 0) the two 1 TB WD blues to a 2 TB volume.
    RAID 1 (mirror) a volume on the 2 TB WD black and a volume on the striped blues.
    Enter image description here

  2. Create two partitions of 1 TB on the black. Create two mirrors.
    Black partition 1 with blue 1
    Black partition 2 with WD blue 2.
    Enter image description here

  3. Or use a smart filesystem such as ZFS. (I am not sure how stable that is on Windows though.)


I am not sure you can do this in many hardware RAID controllers, and I doubt that BIOS supported software RAID (AKA fake RAID) will support it either.

But you can happily do it with mdadm (Linux software RAID), and I suspect that Windows will offer the same functionality. (No OS was specified in the question, so I am keeping this rather generic.) 

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  • Yeah, Windows can do this too with Dynamic Disks. This will deny most non-enterprise backup solutions or whatnot access to the data, though. ZFS isn’t available on Windows. However, Storage Spaces offer a subset of the functionality.
    – Daniel B
    Apr 25, 2015 at 18:14
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Yes, you can. It's a hybrid configuration similar to RAID 0+1. You can search on the Internet how to set your specific hardware.

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  • I am using Windows 7 and Was thinking if its possible to do this. What I was initially thinking was using the 2 WD Blue as a dynamic volume and then use the dynamic volume in a raid 1 configuration. Could you clarify if this is possible in Win7?
    – DarkDestry
    Apr 25, 2015 at 13:26
  • @DarkDestry the posible raid mode are determinated by the raid controller and not by to operating system
    – Francisco Tapia
    Apr 25, 2015 at 13:34
  • Is it possible to do software based raid using diskmgmt of Win7?
    – DarkDestry
    Apr 25, 2015 at 13:59

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