Scooby-kid

Hi all,

I have just put four WD 500gb sata drives in my machine to top up the storage but was wondering if I'd chosen the bet RAID to go with.

The 5th 500gb will have the OS on as I've got so much stuff on it that it would take an age to reinstall it all so the four new drives will just be storage.

I was going to use RAID 5, and if I've understood it correct, this should give me around 1.3 - 1.4TB of storage and enough redundancy that one drive could be dropped completely and the array will still rebuild itself....?

Any advice or better ideas welcome

Scott.

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

RAID 5 is always the best if you can afford the trade off in space.

joshnosh

iTrader: (1)

having dabbled with most types off raid and hard drives before its just not worth it (in my opinion anyway)
most comercal pcs don't support it very well so you don't get the speed boost you would if it was a sever

you need 4 hard drives (and really a spare so you can swap asap when it goes down!)
4x the drives means 1/4 of the reliability. raid sometimes gose wrong as well and sometimes it just wont rebuild. also in a desktop pc they are all powered via the same voltage lines so if the PSU gose pop and hits all 4 drives it only has to kill 2 drives to wipe all your data

personally i think the best set up is SSD drive for your OS and some programs which are soooo much faster than mechanical drives and much more reliable

then a large mechanical drive or 2 for your other files and movies ect

coupled with a external hard drive or sever set to automaticly back up


i dont want to rain on you parade though raid is still allright and yes RAID 5 is probably the best config for your setup

BlkKnight

RAID 0 Striped (no Mirror, no parity)- Maximum Speed, no redundancy (avoid) - minimum 2 disks

RAID 1 - Mirrored (no Stripe, no parity) - Best redundancy - lose 1/2 space - minimum 2 disks

RAID 5 - Blocks Striped, distributed parity - Good performance - lose 1 disk worth of space, minimum 3 disks

RAID 10 - Blocks Mirrored, Blocks Striped - Excellent performance, allows one (possibly two) disk failures. Cost 1/2 disks, minimum 4 disks


In a commercial environment, I only use RAID 10. At home for my movie store I use RAID 5.

With RAID 5, if you lose a disk your performance will be nailed. With RAID 10, you won't notice the difference.

phoenixgold

iTrader: (2)

Are you doing software RAID or does the motherboard have a controller?

RAID level depends on what you are trying to achieve from it, performance or reduncancy? or both?

RAID 5 gets often slated, but I've found it to be good for most circumstances. Not 1/4 of the reliability as you should recover from a single disk failure. Stuffed if multiple disks fail, but then you should have backups and not rely on RAID alone. RAID 5 has the most controller overhead, as it has to calculate the parity. RAID 0,1,10 just write blindly to all disks.

I always run RAID 1 in my main desktop PC (mirroring) to cope with drive failure.

Scooby-kid

Thanks for the advice guys, think I'm going to go with a RAID 5 setup. I've got a Silicon 4 port raid controller on its way. Hard drives are in now so just waiting for that before I can get on with any more.

For those that asked; I'm just after a bit of redundancy. It's only my home pc but it does serve the Xbox's in the house for streaming and has a lifetime of photo's stored on there. I also have a 1TB external and I use SyncToy to control the backup on there

Cheers,
Scott.

Wild Thing

Buy a few identical hardrives and keep them for replacements. Raid 5 does not like mismatched spec drives when swapped out.

dunx

iTrader: (3)

If buying a controller I'd go to RAID 50....

And get afew spare drives.

dunx

P.S. For home use that maybe seen as overkill by some

hodgy0_2

Raid 5 = **** writes, good reads

Chech your application disk access profile