Raid 50

[Styk33]

Looking for ways to do a RAID 50 for my system at home. I have a RAID 5 array right now using eight 200gb drives with a highpoint controller. Works fantastic, but it is full. I was orignally planning on building another RAID 5 array, but was wondering if I could go RAID 50 for better data protection. I could not find much goggling.

Can I use two RAID 5 cards and then use XP to strip them? That is all the info I could find. Is there something better. I would rather not have an OS problem and lose 2+TB of data.

My thoughts for RAID 50 are that I can lose 2 HDDs at one time and still have my data. With two RAID 5 setups if I lose two drives, they better be from seperate arrays.

Thoughts, ideas? I am looking at cheap, so buying 400gb drives is not an option.

[Eickst]

If you are looking for data protection and higher performance, I would do a RAID 10 or a RAID 0+1 before doing RAID 50. The reason I say this is because there are ALOT more controllers capable of it than RAID 50, and software RAID will not be pretty with a RAID 50 solution due to the high amount of writes.

[unhappy_mage]

Raid 50 has the same problem as two raid 5s. You have two raid 5s striped together (with no additional redundancy), so if you lose two disks out of one raid 5 (one half of the stripe) then the entire array will fail, even though one entire half of the array hasn't failed.

The primary advantage of raid 50 arrays IMO is the rebuild time. If a disk goes out, then only that half of the array is tied up doing rebuild stuff.

A raid 6 will give you two drives' worth of redundancy, and thus a little more peace of mind. Areca makes some awesome controllers, but they're very expensive. That's the only hardware solution I know of for raid 6.

Oh, and you may have problems with having a single 2TB+ volume. I think Windows still has problems with that, and the option for it needs to be turned on in Linux.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072 (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=150072)

[Eickst]

If you want alot of protection, RAID 51 would be absolute best way to go. However....the storage efficiency is laughable. But if you need this much data redundancy, you must work for NASA or the IRS.

Like I said, RAID 10 would be your best option.

[Styk33]

I should mention that write times are almost irrelevant to me. Data is transferred overnight usually and it rarely exceeds 100gb. Read times, I am unsure of what I need, but I only have a 100Mb switch and that is enough bandwidth for me.

Currently I am running software RAID with the highpoint controller. But I had the OS drive go down and needed to reinstall the OS and other programs on the OS drive and the array worked fine (OS drive is a 12gb HDD). That is my thing against using Windows to control the RAID, if windows get corrupted I don't want to lose everything.

Thank you for the suggestions so far. Hopefully I have explained everything clearly.