I am considering buying two more hard drives identical to the one I have now, and putting them in a RAID 5 array to increase storage capacity and to add a little security. My question is should I take advantage of the P55 chipsets ability to control RAID 5 or would I be better off getting a dedicated RAID card? I use a Gigabyte P55M-UD2 btw
RAID 5 is usually crap anyway, with very low write speeds (because of parity). You'll see less CPU loading on a dedicated RAID card, though I wouldn't personally do either.
I'm newer to the PC building scene, and I know the benefits of fast read speeds, but I'm not sure of the downsides of low write speeds - would it just make installing and saving take a real long time? If RAID 5 should be avoided, what would be a better option? I want to increase the capacity I have right now to something higher than 500 GB, and getting another drive just to put them in RAID 1 would add security, but not capacity.
Pick up a 1TB disk, mirror the 500GB disk to it using Acronis, format the 500GB drive and use it to back up your important files every so often.
RAID 5 does indeed suffer from comparatively slow writes, and the motherboard solutions are usually regarded as a bit crap in the long run. Personally I don't think RAID really belongs in everyday computers - servers, backup boxes, maybe - and I'd agree with Bakes. A new F3 1TB would be plenty fast, and leave you the 500GB for backup.
Hmm. My whole reasoning for RAID would be that I wouldnt have to back up every now and then, but thats really just me being lazy. I guess getting a 1 TB drive would work, and I'll just back up important files (schoolwork), often. If thats the case, I might as well get an external enclosure for the 500 GB disk.
You should still back up even if you have raid. There are still all sorts of things that could go wrong, viruses, data corruption plus rebuilds take a freaking age. At least with backups you get a fully versioned copy of your data - just set it to backup every 48 hours when you're at dinner.
Thanks for the info, I think I'm going to go ahead and decide to get a 1 TB Hard Drive and put the 500 GB in an external enclosure. And I'll back up every 48 hours or so, I'll just remember to have the external plugged in by a certain time on certain days. The plan was to use it as part of my main PC. I'm a college student paying for college off of scholarships, which pays for everything, a little extra, and the big scholarship (pays full tuition and fees) even gives me a $300/month stipend, so thats my income. (Cant work during the school year, have a full schedule with just school) Therefore I do not yet quite have the resources to build a nice big network storage device and a network to put it in or even a place to put said network. (Dorms are sorta small)
