...many many days ago when 20Gb HDD was the most I could ever need I've heard a tale of RAID. An enthusiast tale that emerged from the dark oxygen deprived world of server rooms. Now years later I find myself littered with 120Gb HDD's... replacing 500Gb HDD's for terabytes in the home server. And I think back to the tale of RAID From very little I know about raid, I think I could stripe two 120Gb HDDs that I have, throw in another 500Gb that I have laying around and have myself a striped & backed up system that runs faster and auto backups. Some noobish questions thus arise... - Is there a performance gain I can achieve, or is it just fancy **** that makes an app open 0.0001sec faster with no noticeable difference? - Is 2-3 year old 120Gb HDD's striped together a match against relatively cheap fast modern drive. (standard 120Gb 7200rpm drives) - I have Asus P5LD2 - Deluxe motherboard that supports RAID. Is that all I need? - What RAID should I use with my available 3 drives? How it works? I guess I set it up through BIOS and then have a single drive on which I can install Win 7? From what I read online RAID 0+1 requires 4 identical drives. Can I do a RAID with 2x120Gb striped and 500Gb for mirroring? Edit: read more, and seems like RAID 0+1 can only be done in multiples of 4. =( - For f... flaming fun.. If someone is buying a new PC. For $190 they can get Fujitsu 150Gb 15000rpm 16mb cache HDD. For the same money, 3 WD 500Gb 7200rpm 32mb cache HDD's can be bought & set into RAID (stripe with parity). Which you think would be faster and why? What are pro cons of RAID vs 1 fast HDD. Please share RAID knowledge. Suggest & comment on what RAID you have/had and what you learned. - Neo
RAID0'ing old drives won't give you much of a performance boost, and any single modern high-density drive would outperform it vastly. RAID 10 / 0+1 needs four drives, not three. RAID5 can be done with three drives. For that, integrated mobo controllers aren't recommended due to the fact that parity calculations are extremely CPU-tasking, and also because the integrated controllers are cheap and nasty. To RAID, you need EXACTLY same drives. Otherwise, performance will be really bad.
RAID0 stripe will increase any drive's benchmark if you put two of the same drive in the array. You'd have to actually benchmark it to find out if it was better than buying a new one. Let's put it this way: if you're using one of the 120gb drives using a second in RAID0 stripe array will be better than just one As mm_vr points out, you need to ideally pair up the same model drive, although its possible to pair up any two drives in a stripe as long as the diskspace matches. Its even possible to raid a 120gb and a 160gb as a stripe, but you only get the capacity of double the lowest drive, so 240gb. Honestly what I'd advise you do with a stack of 120gb drives? Hit the for sale forums down below, flog em all, and buy a new, fast drive
I did some experimenting with cheap 80GB Hitachi Deskstars in raid0, and the setup was much slower (and noisier) than a single Samsung Spinpoint 500GB in everyday and gaming use. I reckon it's because seek time is very important, and raiding cheap hard disks won't decrease their seek time (infact is slightly increases it). Could always use them as a redundant storage setup perhaps? Tbh I think raid is only a reasonable option if you have an SSD or perhaps Velociraptor, and want even more speed. For people buying a raid setup, the money spent on raid would probably be better spent on a single faster drive.
Alright, so then instead of RAID a better solution would be to have a smaller - faster drive for OS/games/apps and then other larger capacity drive for storage (movies photos etc.) What HDD's would you recommend? Around 80-120Gb HDD But then is there a useful solution for bunch of 80, 60, 120Gb HDD's laying around? Selling is not really worth it.
The only small drives that might be worth going for would be a WD Raptor or something like that because generally the small drives tend to have lower platter densities.I'd go for a single platter 500GB/320GB drive and use that for boot. You may as well use the slower drives to back stuff up onto , you won't get much money for them these days indeed.
Backing stuff up on old drives ain't a very good solution (they aren't reliable). Are the old drives SATA or IDE? I could do with a couple, but then again you said it's not worth selling them.
