Hello, I have 4 samsung F3 1TB HD's and would like to setup a RAID to increase speed of the drives. So I should do RAID1+0 correct? And take the 3rd drive and mirror it with the 4th? My first drive has the OS, programs/games, documents, pictures, videos etc My second drive I was using for graphics/video documents such as presets, saved templates, saved stock art, etc. 3rd and 4th drive brand new, not installed So I want to use the 3rd and 4th for a RAID setup to capture HD video.
raid5. always raid5. it's is the best for space and gives you the flexibility to expand later. RAID0+1 has the overhead of mirroring just like raid5 has the overhead of calculating parity so there's no performance benefit and you only get 2TB instead of 3. if you have less than 1TB of data right now, you can dump it all onto one of the drives and make the other three into a raid5 array. then transfer the data onto it and expand the array to 4 drives. if you have more than 1TB of data right now, you need to delete some. you can't RAID drives that have data on them. also, buy a system drive. keep your OS and programs on one drive, and your data on the RAID array.
You won't get any noticable improvement by Raid-ing your drives, certainly not without a dedicated high end Raid card and even then only under certain tasks. Forget raiding your 4 * F1s, and save the pennies for an SSD. I've got 2 * F1s attached to my P6TD Deluxe for data, with an SSD for OS. I've got another 4 * F1s in a freenas box as Raid 5 which is backup for my machines, and another F1 I keep as spare in case of HD failure. I would always recomend keeping the speed + backup areas separate. Raid5 / Raid1 etc is not a backup, so first thing make sure you are happy with your backup system, and only then decide if you need to do anything about speed.
I was told(read) a RAID1+0 Setup would almost double my drive speed and create a data mirror. I get about 25 fps capture with 1 F3, and I need to get at least 40 for 1080p capture...preferably more. But I was hoping to see an increase with this RAID setup if I keep ONLY captured video files on the RAID.
