Alright so I now have all the HDD's I could ever need for my rig. The list is as follows 2x74gb Raptors 3x500gb Seagate Barracudas 1 WD x 320gb HD Now my question is, What do I do with them? The raptors are easy, I'll raid 0 them and install apps/windows on them But the 3 500's and the 320? I figure I have a few options. 1) Raid 1 two of the 500's for security and place important files on these two HDD's and leave the other 2 (320 and 500) for other documents 2) Buy another 500 and ditch the 320gb/ put it in a usb cage and throw it in my car and run 2 500gb raid 1's and have 1 terabyte of raid 1 security 3) Run a crazy raid setup with #2 and have 2 raid 0's mirrored (Is that raid 5?) 4) I dunno What should I do? The 320gb drive is killing me here. I know I have enough space, but I hate that my drives aren't matched. It's like the ugly duckling. Oh and I also run a Sata DVD drive so I'm going to need a Raid PCI-E card. Should I get one and plug my raptors into it? Or should I plug the storage HDD's into it?
Don't bother with RAID0 on the raptors, it doesn't improve performance (just benchmark scores). You would be better off runing them seperately (maybe OS on one and apps/games on the other), or run RAID1 on them. With the other storage, you could get rid of the 320 and get another 500 and a reasonably cheap RAID5 controller (like a highpoint) and run RAID5 on the 4x500 (you can use RAID5 with 3 drives too, but imo its not really worth it with less than 4). Alternatively you can run RAID0+1 on 4x500 if you don't want to fork out for a seperate controller, but you're losing a terabyte of space to redundancy there (I believe thats what you mean by 3).
Hmmm Interesting. I actually want to run raid 0 on my raptors for benchmarks as well as having a single drive "in software" that makes installing apps much easier to do when you're running 6 HDD's in one case. So I'm running raid 0 to simplify and give me 5 virtual drives. Space is not really an issue. The difference to me between 1 tera and 2 is almost nothing. I mean sure, 2 tera is awesome, but by the time I actually get to 1 terabyte I'll be able to buy 4 terabyte drives and I'll upgrade to a 16 terabyte solution (hopefully with 500gb raptor xxxxxxx's) So maybe 0+1 but who knows. Maybe I'll just raid the raptors and leave the other 4 alone. I just want to know what I can do.
Have the raptors in raid 0, buy another 500GB and have them four in raid 5 (1.5GB + hot swap) for the best of both worlds (redundancy + speed).
As MisterTad said, I would have one games/apps drives, and a windows drive. As for the 320GB, sell it here, somebody will be interested.Buy a 500GB, and as Koola said, RAID5.
RAID (be it RAID0 or RAID5) doesn't present many advantages where speed is concerned for home use, not in the way benchmarks may suggest anyway. The benefits RAID5 at home are simply redundancy and a having a single logical volume.
on a lower speed drive raid 0 can make a difference. i used to have 4 x 250gb setup as raid 0 but they where old 5400 rpm disks. i always find raid 5 had too much of an overhead as well for home use. when i used to have scsi in the old days i had 10x 4gb disks in a raid 5 setup. and raid 5 has high overheads when writing.
On a modern, pure hardware controller (read: not onboard), the overheads should be minimal (again, talking about home use)
this is what i'd do but raid0 isnt for everyone, i like the performance characteristics of raid 0, i know the downsides but i still choose to run raid0 for system disk
"2 terabytes of storage what do I do?" Fill it with pr0n (someone had to say it ) Personally i'd leave the raptors and the 320gb out of raid, but the 500gb disks in a raid 5 array on a dedicated raid card
alright tons of options. Thanks guys. I'll take it all into consideration. Anyone know any good raid PCI-e cards?
The 3Ware 9650s are very good, running an IOP341, and well priced. For all out performance, Areca 1680, but cheap they are not. Highpoint cards are a half and half solution if you don't want to fork out for full hardware RAID, they don't have teh same power as a hardware card, but they're far cheaper and a much better proposition than a software array.
On raid 0, do what tad says, ignore everyone else. Frankly, they're all noobs compared to him when it comes to hard disks. /inflamatory statements
Raid 5 - I would ditch the 320gb, get another 500gb drive and a RAID5 controller. A good controller will last you along time, and when you upgrade in the future you can use the same controller. It does however cost. I just put 4 x 750Gb in RAID5 on my motherboard. 1st step. The read performace is great but it is slow to write...Not good. 2nd step is to get an 8 port RAID controller...££ Ouch... Then another set of drives for another raid array. BTW. I have lots of data, so I also backup onto external drives just in case.
Whey you say slow to write, do you mean multiple IO stuff or just general writing one file at a time? Because I have an issue with my media center recording tv and writing tv at the same time adn just wondered if this was why?
"Slow to write on RAID5" The issues I face are with single files (multiple files would be worse). RAID5 requires maths to work out what data to write to the disks. I use onboard RAID5 which can not do the maths very fast, hence slow write. I am not writing at the speed of the disks but rather the speed of the controller. Are you using RAID5 on your media centre?
