Hi, I'm very soon going to run out of space for storage. I currently have a 1TB OS drive and 2 x 1TB RAID 0 synchronised with a WD 2TB external drive for backup. Unfortunately the video files are maxing out my space and I only have 120GB left of the 2TB internal RAID setup. I need to upgrade to at least 3TB while still leave me redundancy for drive failure. I have an Asus P5K premium so I was looking at perhaps using 4 x 1TB drives in a RAID 5 internal setup but I have a few problems/questions: * I don't have enough SATA ports (my mobo has 6 - 2 DVD, 3 HDD, 1 covered by the graphics card) so will I have to get a 4 port SATA card or can you split the drives across the mobo and a PCI expansion card? * does running RAID 5 through your southbridge or PCI card significantly affect general performance? * if a drive fails, will there be a notification, and if so, is it likely to tell me which drive is the problem * I could get 3 x 1.5TB drives which would solve my port problem but do these have higher failiure rates? Any comments are greatly appreciate or if you have any suggestions for an alternative storage solution? Thanks Justin
wow your seriously considered your drives are gunna fail. ive been working with PC for 7 or 8 years and only had a few HDDs fail during that time. i guess its better to be cautious though. Why not just move the DVD drives to the add-on card ? then 5 ports are free for your raid. It should not no, maybe in a benchmark but not real world apps. you would have to test each drive to check which one it is. No they dont. but make sure you get the newer 1.5TB ones like the seagate barracuda 7200.11 as these have 500GB areal densities and therefore only 3 platters making them incredibly fast mechanical drives. older 1.5TB tend to have more platters and much lower density and therefore are quite slow. However the main issue is here why do you need RAID5 or this much backup ??? drives dont fail very often and you already seem to have backed up your backup ?
You could try one of these http://www.icydock.com/product/mb561us-4s.html Thats if you are not using Raid 5, 1 x eSATA connection and you have 4 drives of storage!!!
Could the port blocked by your graphics card be accessed with a right-angled SATA cable? Also, RAID is NOT a backup solution! Yes, it makes it easier to get up and running if/when a drive dies, but you're more likely to lose data through user error/software corruption than hardware failure. Making proper, regular backups is still very very necessary.
Yea RAID is not a backup - I've previously had an internal RAID 5 array for 3x1TB drives and the whole thing messed up thinking it needed to be constantly rebuilt Instead I tried to build a NAS box with FreeNAS and failed because it doesn't do software RAID 5 that well, so in the end I just bought a four disk NAS box
Hi, Bagpuss - thank you for your comments, I always consider the possibilty of drives failing, and it would be horrendous to lose that data. You are right of course about the SATA connections, putting the DVD drives through a controller instead, I don't know why I didn't think of that, obvious really My graphics card is completely blocking the SATA, even with a right-angled connection the card would be lifted up too far to affect the graphics card, that's the drawback of having a big fat one. I was planning to do away with my external storage unit when I upgraded to RAID 5 because it wouldn't be big enough to back up to. But based on everybodys comments I don't feel confident just relying on a RAID 5 setup to store my data reliably. I guess my only option to be safe is an internal RAID 0 backing up to external setup of the same size
May I ask why the RAID0 on the 1TB? Is it explicitly for the 2TB external so it synchs up? You're getting faster speeds with the RAID0 but if one of those drives fails, the data from both is gone, albeit backed up by the external. With two separate disks if one drive dies you only have to restore half the data. Just questions out of curiosity. If the 2TB was capable of synching 2 1TB's, I would just leave them non-raid that way if something did happen I would only have to restore 1 drive, and not both.
Yep, its purely a synching reason, the problem is that I'm maxing out my 2TB limit at the moment so I need to upgrade. I currently use WD Anywhere Backup which is really good. The problem is synching when I upgrade my internal drives, you only get WD external drives in 2TB and 4TB flavours.
