Storage Best way to use 4 hard drives

I'd like some opinions from the people more knowledgeable than I on the best way to use my drives if you please.

I have two 2TB drives right now in my makeshift "server" and was going to get two more (the OS on a seperate drive). With the two I have already one is back up for the other and every time I change or add something I have to do it to both (been like this for two weeks or so but already annoying).

The past few days I looked into it a little and saw mention of making them dynamic disks so windows could use one as backup for the other and do differential backups but the ones I have are too close to full and can't be converted anyway.

Since I was going to buy two more already I figured now would be a good time to decide. With four identical drives and not wanting to lose the data should I let windows handle it with the dynamic disks, should I go with raid of some flavor (the mobo has 6 SATAII and is 0/1/10/JBOD capable), or something else entirely?

 

since you're using on board, i wouldn't bother raiding through that as you might have issues with the 2tb drives, a lot of them won't be able to go over 2tb limit. also since its software anyway you might as well just use the raid option via windows disk management to do a striped or spanned (safer) volume on the 2 new disks. then once you have your 4 tb pool set up, copy over all of your data, then make another 4tb pool to mirror to from you existing disks.
if you have budget for it, i would suggest a nas instead.

 

Well it's not too old of a board, it's this one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131619

I was actually using freenas on it before but it gave me too much crap so I installed windows. I have the thing sitting here and working fine, no need to go blow the money on a nas

I was figuring I'd just make the new ones dynamic then copy things over freeing up enough space on the ones I have already to switch them to dynamic as well and be sorted with 2x2TB storage and an identical 2x2TB for backup and windows updating them whenever something changed. But I wanted to see what my other options are before I go that route.

 

the best way to use 4 hard drives would be for you to plug them in to your computer and not have them sitting in a box on ur shelf...and no i didn't take time to read ur post just the tittle

 

You leave my tittle alone! lol

 

sorry didn't realize it IS your nas. since you said makeshift i assumed... otherwise it sounds like we're on the same mind about set up.
otherwise the only other thing i could recommend is using an os that has proper zfs support, like opensolaris and going that route.