I've been collecting little hard drives over the years and filling them up faster than is responsible.  The irresponsible-ness was shown in how crappy the inside of my case looking as of late, so I finally broke down and grabbed a couple of new 2tb drives to consolidate the movie collections that have been building up on a handful of 250gb and 500gb drives.  Storage is so inexpensive anymore, might as well buy big!

Virtual organization: I had a small problem: how to fit the new drive in so I could start consolidating?  My M2N32-SLI dlx motherboard has 6 sata slots, 2 more esata/raid slots at the top/back, and one pci sata controller for 2 more sata slots.  Total of ten slots we're talking here, and every single one was occupied.  I wrote down about 4 pages of notes outlining my plan of attack on how to shuffle everything around to empty out just one drive so I could pull it out and replace with one of the new big ones.  Once one 2tb was in, I was able to empty all of the movie drives contents into it and continue with the rest of the project.  Yeah, I kinda overplan sometimes.. I get that from my dad.

Hardware organization: Hard drives were stacked wherever I could fit them, some up top in the rack, some down below in the water cooling area (this is the big Silverstone TJ07-BW, with upper and lower compartments).  This had to change, so having a welder, a cutter, and a sexy metal trash bin that saw rare use, I went to work on a new rack for the drives.

Let's look at some pics! (clicky for large view)
   
   
 

Now.. why did I do that with a trash bin?  Psh why not.. Use what you have!

RAID: And now with more drives than I need, I finally converted those bottom four 250gb drives into a RAID 0+1 array.  I fretted over that since I've never done RAID before, but that couldn't have been any easier!  Simply enable RAID on those drives in BIOS, then after POST you're presented with an option to manage arrays during boot up.  Enter that program and choose the type of RAID that your mobo/controller card supports and enable.  Job done.  I now have a stripe mirrored array of four drives for 500gb.  Neat. Too easy.

Rock: Time to get back to work!