Which RAID type would you use?

Which RAID level would you use at home?

  • No RAID, just a bunch of drives

    Votes: 14 26.4%

  • RAID 0 (striped, no parity)

    Votes: 11 20.8%

  • RAID 1 (mirror set)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • RAID 5 (striped with parity)

    Votes: 23 43.4%

  • RAID 10 (crazy Intel Matrix raid 0+1, 1+0)

    Votes: 5 9.4%
  • Total voters
    53
M

moshpit

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 16, 2006
Messages
448
Take 4 750Gb SATA drives, and any choice of none (no RAID), 0, 1, 5, or 10, which would you use on your home computer and why (the why of course posted as a response)?
 
Since this is a gaming rig first.

My first Raid 0 is short stroked for OS. The second set is the same for my games plus raid 1 for my data. The internal 750 is for online backup. The external 750 is for offline backup.

What do you plan on doing??
 
I use to run first gen 74gb raptors in RAID 0 with an intel mobo, was pretty nice then but now just run a 320gb as my boot and with 8gb of ram, I doubt I could tell much of a difference in load times. Also use to keep storage in a dedicated RAID 5 server, now just sits on 3 - 1 TB green drives in my case, nothing I cannot replace over time and to me just less of a hassle.

Remember, RAID isn't a backup, just meant for a drive bombing on you with no warnings.
 
SiG357 said:
Since this is a gaming rig first.

My first Raid 0 is short stroked for OS. The second set is the same for my games plus raid 1 for my data. The internal 750 is for online backup. The external 750 is for offline backup.

What do you plan on doing??
Click to expand...

Well, I already have a RAID 5 setup on them, but was seriously rethinking my strategy. I kinda wanted to get a general feel for what most of my fellow geeks were using now and weigh my options.

Just an interesting early observation, it seems that my strategy is the same as the early majority so far. RAID 5 seems to be a popular choice for balancing performance with redundancy. Maybe it's just that 64kb stripe sizes were a wrong choice for using RAID 5? Any opinions on that? I also see 3 votes for Crazy Intel Matrix Raid. Any comments to how that's working out for ya'll?
 
All depends on what you're doing.

For my gaming rig in my sig I went RAID 0 for both the OS drives and my game/storage drives.

However, I also have a NAS on my home network for backups and that has a simple RAID 1 on the storage drives. Not perfect redunancy but enough for me. I occasionally burn stuff on removable media as well with either machine in order to further protect myself.
 
Vermillion said:
All depends on what you're doing.

For my gaming rig in my sig I went RAID 0 for both the OS drives and my game/storage drives.

However, I also have a NAS on my home network for backups and that has a simple RAID 1 on the storage drives. Not perfect redunancy but enough for me. I occasionally burn stuff on removable media as well with either machine in order to further protect myself.
Click to expand...

I think I need a BDRW or something then, doing the same on my rig with DVD's is painfully slow considering I can only get a little over 4gb at a time that way off of my system. BDRW is something like 20+ Gb per disk I think, I definately need something like that :p
 
WHS for backups, storage, and media streaming. Short-stroked RAID0 for the OS partitions on my desktops (One w/ (2) Seagate 7200.12 500GB's and the other w/ (3) WD6400AAKS's).
 
What is "short stroked" RAID 0? Is it something you do to the stripe size or something?
 
moshpit said:
Well, I already have a RAID 5 setup on them, but was seriously rethinking my strategy. I kinda wanted to get a general feel for what most of my fellow geeks were using now and weigh my options.

Just an interesting early observation, it seems that my strategy is the same as the early majority so far. RAID 5 seems to be a popular choice for balancing performance with redundancy. Maybe it's just that 64kb stripe sizes were a wrong choice for using RAID 5? Any opinions on that? I also see 3 votes for Crazy Intel Matrix Raid. Any comments to how that's working out for ya'll?
Click to expand...


It would still help in knowing your goal.

RAID 1+0 is also an option. Balance in Speed and Redundancy.
 
moshpit said:
I think I need a BDRW or something then, doing the same on my rig with DVD's is painfully slow considering I can only get a little over 4gb at a time that way off of my system. BDRW is something like 20+ Gb per disk I think, I definately need something like that :p
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree with that. Burning 4.7GB of data when you have 100GB of data to burn takes too long. Even with a dual-layer DVD it would take awhile.

If BluRay media would come down in price a little bit it would be far more attractive.
 
SiG357 said:
It would still help in knowing your goal.

RAID 1+0 is also an option. Balance in Speed and Redundancy.
Click to expand...

Well, my goal is mainly just to find out the general trends in RAID useage is among fellow geeks. And RAID 1+0 is included in the poll under RAID 10.
 
moshpit said:
Well, my goal is mainly just to find out the general trends in RAID useage is among fellow geeks.
Click to expand...

As others have stated, selection of a RAID type is dependent on what the system is being used for ... so, it's a bit difficult to answer the question. IOW, I use JBOD, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 ... so how do I respond to the poll?
 
With all this talk.

I may consider changing my RAID and use (4) of my 640's In a Raid 0 (short-stroked to 320 gig) for my OS/Games. And using Intel Matrix to Raid 10 the rest of the space.
 
I have a Raid 5 array for my OS consisting of 3x 150gb WD Raptor X's, and I'm also running a Raid 0 stripe for my general storage area which is two 1TB Samsung Spinpoint disks.
 
Dually said:
As others have stated, selection of a RAID type is dependent on what the system is being used for ... so, it's a bit difficult to answer the question. IOW, I use JBOD, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 ... so how do I respond to the poll?
Click to expand...

If you reread the opening post, I think I was fairly clear. What RAID level are you using in your main home PC? Do you use those 4 types of drive arrays you mentioned ALL on your home system? If so, you must have one HELL of a power supply on there :p

I'm not asking for advise here. I'm asking what YOU are using at home, and why you made that choice.
 
moshpit said:
If you reread the opening post, I think I was fairly clear. What RAID level are you using in your main home PC? Do you use those 4 types of drive arrays you mentioned ALL on your home system? If so, you must have one HELL of a power supply on there :p

I'm not asking for advise here. I'm asking what YOU are using at home, and why you made that choice.
Click to expand...
Raid 5 has a write penalty. It's only good for things you want to keep redundant(and arguably because of MTBF's, not even for that) but read quickly. So in otherwords, if you run Raid 5, you probably also want a Raid 0 array somewhere also.
 
Zoson said:
Raid 5 has a write penalty. It's only good for things you want to keep redundant(and arguably because of MTBF's, not even for that) but read quickly. So in otherwords, if you run Raid 5, you probably also want a Raid 0 array somewhere also.
Click to expand...

Yeah, and that write penalty can be pretty steep if the controller is already IO slammed.
 
moshpit said:
If you reread the opening post, I think I was fairly clear.
I'm not asking for advise here. I'm asking what YOU are using at home, and why you made that choice.
Click to expand...

Actually it is a bit confusing because you said. "What would you use" not "What do you use" ;)
 
moshpit said:
If you reread the opening post, I think I was fairly clear. What RAID level are you using in your main home PC?
Click to expand...

My apologies ... I must have missed the words "main' and "do".

moshpit said:
Do you use those 4 types of drive arrays you mentioned ALL on your home system? I'm not asking for advise here. I'm asking what YOU are using at home, and why you made that choice
Click to expand...

I utilize them ALL in systems in my home ...

  • Desktop 1 - JBOB and RAID 10
  • Desktop 2 - JBOD
  • Laptop 1 - Single Disk
  • Laptop 2 - Single Disk
  • Tablet 1 - Single Disk
  • Server 1 - RAID 1 - High Availability - Applications
  • Server 2 - RAID 1 - High Availability - Applications
  • Server 3 - RAID 1 - High Availability - Applications
  • Server 4 - RAID 1 - High Availability - Applications
  • Server 5 - RAID 5 - High Availability - Data
  • Sever 6 - RAID 5 - High Availability - Data

Desktop 1 is my main desktop ... it's due for a refresh ... next incarnation will be RAID 1 and RAID 10.

Hope that helps ...
 
Dually said:
My apologies ... I must have missed the words "main' and "do".
Click to expand...

moshpit said:
which would you use on your home computer and why
Click to expand...

That was the original words I used, exact quote.

The part you responded with about "I use them all in systems in my home..." followed by the descriptions of which RAIDs and what they were doing does follow what I asked for originally. The "main" part was never a necessity (just something I thought would make it easier since you seemed reluctant) but the "why" part and "home" part were. Sorry if that wasn't as clear to you as it seemed to me.
 
I roll R0 on everything because I love SPEED.
And I have a solid backup system that backups everything, everyday.
So If I have a drive screwup i lose at most one day of work.

Plus i store 90% of my data on the server. The only thing i keep on the desktop is the OS, installed apps, and some documents.
 
I don't use any form of RAID. I backup everything onto optical media as an actual backup and keep the data on whatever drive I feel like having it on at the time.

I don't have to worry about the higher risk of data loss with RAID 0 and I wouldn't really see much in the way of real world performance increase as little of my daily usage requires really high sustained reads/writes. Even with everything backed up, a death of a single drive in a RAID 0 array is going to cost me a lot of time with regards to copying everything back over from my backups. Yes, there is still a risk of a single drive dying but that risk is a lot lower with a single drive and I only have to restore from backups the data which would fit on one drive instead of two.

I'm always running out of storage and I don't have a lot of money so RAID 1 is out of the question for me.

I don't care for a penalty in write speeds so RAID 5 is out of the question even if it does alleviate the "loss" of drive space compared to RAID 1.

As for any other type of RAID, it's generally more hassle than what it's worth for my uses. To mitigate read/write penalties and access times I have multiple drives with data, programs and OSes stored on the different drives. When the OS is doing something, I can still load or run a program from a different drive with little to no penalty. I can also run multiple disk intensive programs on different drives without having much if anything in the way of penalties. I do multitask a lot with disk intensive programs and have found the best solution for me is multiple drives with the workload spread out between them. I have used setups like this for years and have found them to be the cheapest, easiest and most failproof way of running my systems. It's not for everyone but it works great for me.

 
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