Hi Joe, unfortunately not, the way RAID 5 works distributing the parity data across drives requires a minimum setup of 3 drives. It's also inflexible, if you need to increase the array size you have to start all over again - there are proprietary RAID systems like Netgear use in their NAS devices that allow you to add extra drives without a rebuild, but these are costly solutions.

Maybe you should take a look at doing an unRAID setup using an HP MicroServer (those two links are to guides we've made on this forum). unRAID works by using a single parity drive instead of distributing parity across all the drives in the array. The benefits to this are twofold, first you can expand your array very easily by adding extra drives - all that needs to happen is the new drive is filled with 0 bits so the parity does not change i.e. no data risk or need to rebuild - second, you can have a HDD die and quickly swap it out and the data will be rebuilt from the parity drive much faster that a RAID 5 solution. You can read more about the benefits of it and how it works here

If a drive fails or is missing, you will even still have full use of the entire array, including the contents of the failed or missing drive, just as with any similar RAID system. You can copy files from all drives including the missing one, plus you can even copy files to the missing drive, although performance will be considerably slower. The unRAID system is designed to reconstruct all of your data and the file systems, IF the parity info is being fully maintained with all of your data drives.


BTW, no I don't work for unRAID/Lime Tech, I'm just a happy user

You're welcome (welcome to the forums too!)

I missed the part about already being setup I've actually never heard of disParity before so I'll do some reading on that - it sounds effectively like the same system used by unRAID, but done as a Windows software solution - if it lives up to its claims its pretty clever.

Windows 7 will do software RAID depending on what version you are running, but you will be hit with the same limitations of RAID 5. In theory you could setup unRAID or another OS/RAID setup within Windows 7 using virtualization software like VMWare, but I haven't really used it much myself to be able to inform you of the best way to go about it and I don't think it's cheap. From having a quick google it seems this isn't viable without suitable hardware, as the emulation needed is too slow.

I was originally going to setup my Microserver on Windows 7 or Windows Home Server too, but then I decided I wanted the better data security offered by unRAID even if it sacrificed the HTPC aspect - but I have a gigabit network, PS3 in my lounge and PS3 Media Server running on my main computer, so that handles my media center needs.

Having just read a bit more on disParity and people using it on AVSForum it sounds like its your ideal solution You could set a scheduled task up to run the parity calculation command as often as you like. There is a competing software RAID called FlexRAID, take a look at that too.