A little confused on RAID

[Meph3961]

I building a new rig from scratch and am a little confused on RAID. I will be using a SSD drive for my main windows and games drive. ( I haven't decided which yet. I'm looking at these: Intel X25-M, Crucial RealSSD C300, OCZ Vertex 2.)
Any advice would be great.

But my real dilemia is that i will have 4 1TB HDD for data and multimedia. Now the question is should i run all 4 in a Raid 5 array. Where I have parity if one fails, or should I just run them in raid 0?

THanks guys

 

[tweakboy]

You dont wanna have them all chained up. Keep 2 drives at normal . and run raid 0 on your other two 1tb hds. Daz just me, someone may say something else.

Also get the X25-M . I hope you can fit in all your os and apps and games on that....

 

[bjamm2]

Im in the exact same situation.

Im building a media server/dvr.

Will run the OS off an extra 60gb Vertex SSD I have.

I bought four 2tb Samsung F4 drives from newegg this week and I was considering Raid0/Raid5 but can't decide on what to do.

Is there a way to setup two raid 0 setups.. 4tb each one?

I will be using onboard raid on an EVGA SLI X58 mobo...

btw sorry to hijack the thread a little bit

 

[Stan]

RAID0 statistically increases your odds of a failure in the volume. If the data is low value to you; RAID0 is the most cost effective way to store data. If your data is valuable; RAID5 over 4 1TB drives will net you 3TB usable; but you can lose one and not lose data.

It comes down to how important is your data. If the cost to replace 1TB of media is less than the cost of an extra drive for RAID5, go with RAID0.

 

[power_hour]

I building a new rig from scratch and am a little confused on RAID. I will be using a SSD drive for my main windows and games drive. ( I haven't decided which yet. I'm looking at these: Intel X25-M, Crucial RealSSD C300, OCZ Vertex 2.)
Any advice would be great.

But my real dilemia is that i will have 4 1TB HDD for data and multimedia. Now the question is should i run all 4 in a Raid 5 array. Where I have parity if one fails, or should I just run them in raid 0?

THanks guys

For media, just run RAID 0 for best performance and use an external device to backup the files. RAID 5 is really for hardcore data users who absolutely can't afford to lose any data and willing to lose performance for that tradeoff. Is that really worth it to lose performance in your case? I don't think so...

Also make sure your OS files and your pagefile are on different spindles for a bump in performance.

 

[Emulex]

raid-5 is not desirable by anyone. single disk failure protection and slooow. i'd rather just pony up for raid-10 for data protection.

for home- i think raid-0 is the only raid to consider- or jbod/unraid tech

 

[Khyron320]

I have a 2 arrays in raid5 currently my 2tb 3x1tb raid 5 array that i store everything and anything. This is backed up to a 2tb single drive via rsync weekly...

My new 4tb 3x2tb raid5 array is for mythtv content i couldnt care less about data integrity. I just want 1 giant volume that wont stop recording should 1 disk fail. Im doing a rebuild right now and the array is taking 80+ hours. Pulling a recorded stream off it im getting ~13mb/sec so the array is still usable degraded. Its the purpose of raid5 IMO.

 

[masteryoda34]

Why is everyone saying RAID5 is slow? Sure, RAID5 is slower than RAID1, but a RAID 5 array would be faster than a single drive by itself.

 

[Jovec]

In simple terms, RAID is for uptime. Implement a proper backup solution for backup. A lot of times RAID is suggested when it's not really needed or even beneficial. How many home users treat RAID as a backup? And how many home RAID users have successfully recovered from failed arrays?

The simplest thing to do is just use X drives as data/storage and use X more to backup to. This will give you added protection against user error (delete/modify the wrong file on a RAID without a backup and that file is gone), and it's very easy to recover your data since don't have to rebuild arrays. It's also guaranteed to survive mobo switches/upgrades.

I'm not against RAID, but it's often a more complex solution than needed.

 

[Spikesoldier]

save yourself some headache and run two RAID 1 arrays with those 4 1TB disks, and run the SSD as the boot drive.

 

[Spikesoldier]

also, others are right that said that anyone running a RAID 0 stripe will increase total array failure to the first disk that fails. RAID 0 has no redundancy (so you can drop the R off of RAID) so there is no parity of the lost disk. although i am rolling the dice, i would take the increased risk on a ssd RAID 0 due to their lower failure rate, and higher durability, compared to a spinning disk.

there would be no way i would take a gamble on a spinning disk RAID 0 stripe, if you look at the failure rate for those today, especially the large capacity ones above 1TB. A 1TB disk is the highest capacity consumer disk i would trust long-term at the moment. Until sometime last year, my recommendation to you would have been 750GB disks.

 

[power_hour]

also, others are right that said that anyone running a RAID 0 stripe will increase total array failure to the first disk that fails. RAID 0 has no redundancy (so you can drop the R off of RAID) so there is no parity of the lost disk. although i am rolling the dice, i would take the increased risk on a ssd RAID 0 due to their lower failure rate, and higher durability, compared to a spinning disk.

there would be no way i would take a gamble on a spinning disk RAID 0 stripe, if you look at the failure rate for those today, especially the large capacity ones above 1TB. A 1TB disk is the highest capacity consumer disk i would trust long-term at the moment. Until sometime last year, my recommendation to you would have been 750GB disks.

Disk failures are not that common. I know most people don't but if you simply just backup your files to an external device then the performance gains are worth the risk of an eventual failure. These are home PCs so you want to boost performance w/e possible especially if your playing games or streaming media and sometimes at the sametime

But whatever floats your boat. Its all good.