Just bought four 3 tb hard drives , need a recommendation on raid

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UnrealCpu

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Is it worth it to raid these drives?
I feel its not worth it if you dont have the backup space to make a image.
What do you think?

I think single drive is the way to go for reliability
 
what do you plan to use them for?

your raid options are:

raid 0
raid 1
raid 5

if you use matrix raid you could do a mix of raid's

if you dont need the performance increase, use single drives.
 
MrGuvernment said:
what do you plan to use them for?

your raid options are:

raid 0
raid 1
raid 5

if you use matrix raid you could do a mix of raid's

if you dont need the performance increase, use single drives.
Click to expand...

Yeah i think i am just going to use single drives.... I dont think there is much a performance increase. Plus who wants to worry about failure an then you lose all your information. I would need another 12tb to backup on
 
RAID 1 mirrors your drives, so with 4 drives, you lose half of your total space, but you would have minimal chance of losing your data.

RAID 5 creates parity data on each drive, so if one drive fails, the parity data from the other 3 drives can be used to restore the failed one. This makes you lose 1 drive worth of storage, so you lose less storage space than with RAID 1. However, the chances of losing all your data goes up because there is the chance that one of the drives will fail while restoring the failed drive. This risk, however, is fairly minimal with a small RAID 5 setup. It increases with larger setups.
 
RAID 5 has built in redundancy for drive failure. If you lose 1 drive you just replace the drive and the RAID should rebuild itself. The chances of 2 or more of the drives dropping dead at the same exact time would be pretty unlikely. I think you would have to worry more about natural disasters (fire, water etc.) than the drives going dead at the same exact time. In the event that a natural disaster occurs you will lose the drives no matter how they are configured which is why you should always have an off site backup if the data is important.

If you are doing it right and you have a hardware RAID controller RAID 5 will be quite a bit faster than JBOD.
 
it is unlikely but with the size of 2T /3T and up drives rebuild times take a LONG time and it puts ALOT of stress on a desktop grade harddrive so chances are allot higher.
 
Rebuilding a drive is a lot better than just losing all the data on a particular drive. Reads and writes "stress" is normal.

I rather take my chances with a RAID 5 array than a single disk if I'm not backing it up at all.
 
You could "pool" them and then only duplicate the important files. Etc, pictures, documents, videos, etc. Then just don't duplicate other stuff like music and movies that you can rerip or redownload. You'll save disk space. Also I recommend also backing up those important folders to an external drive, little NAS, or online backup. That's how mine is setup at home on my WHS2011. Important stuff is duplicated on the pool and also backup to a NAS and online via Crashplan.
 
You could do RAID 0+1 or even better, 1+0. Striping 2 mirrors would be fast and provide a small amount of redundancy.
 
Personally i feel the only way i would do raid 0 or any raid is if i had another 12tb worth of space. 6 tb for me right now is not enough.. I ran raid for a good year until one of my drives failed and loss all my data. That was only 320gb at the time.. it would be nice to mirror but then again i would have to have another 4 , 3tb hdds. What does raid get anyway ? 300mbps? for read and writes?
 
Matrix raid you dont, you could cut a small chuck for raid 0 and make the rest raid 1 or 5. using 2 disks, once you use 3 or more intel matrix wont let you do raid 1 but then your forced into raid 5.

raid 0 varies but you usually get double the through put and similar seek times, i recall once you get to 3-4 drives or more in raid 0 seek times go up considerably.
 
If you do RAID 5, you'll be left with 9tb worth of space.

Running RAID 0 with multiple hard drives is a really big risk. Because if one drive in the RAID array fails, you lose all your data, because there is no redundancy at all.

My cousin is planning to do RAID 0 with 4 128gb SSDs. Quite frankly, that is one of the stupidest things I can think of doing when it comes to RAID.
 
Raid 5 has been proven ancient for drives this big. Rebuild times on these disks with parity-raid will take a long time and the chance of corruption because of w/e are quite big with 4 disks from the same batch. Raid6 would be better but with only 4 disks i would go raid 1+0, far lower rebuild times and higher write throughput.
 
Tsumi said:
My cousin is planning to do RAID 0 with 4 128gb SSDs. Quite frankly, that is one of the stupidest things I can think of doing when it comes to RAID.
Click to expand...

Stupidest? Do you know what forum your posting on? RAID 0 with 4 128GB SSDs is AWESOME. My dream rig right now would have 4x256GB SSDs in RAID 0.

As long as your data is backed up, which everyone should regardless of if you have a RAID array or not, then there is nothing to worry about.
 
UnrealCpu said:
Personally i feel the only way i would do raid 0 or any raid is if i had another 12tb worth of space. 6 tb for me right now is not enough.. I ran raid for a good year until one of my drives failed and loss all my data. That was only 320gb at the time.. it would be nice to mirror but then again i would have to have another 4 , 3tb hdds. What does raid get anyway ? 300mbps? for read and writes?
Click to expand...


If your data has grown from 320 gb to over 6 tb in recent times, no doubt you need to consider future growth - - so why waste time trying to configure something in your pc, I would suggest you consider building a proper nas
 
I would do RAID 5.

That way you get 9GB storage, 3GB of parity in case of failure.

If you do RAID 0, you have no protection. If you do RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 1+0, etc. you only have 6GB storage.
 
Tsumi said:
My cousin is planning to do RAID 0 with 4 128gb SSDs. Quite frankly, that is one of the stupidest things I can think of doing when it comes to RAID.
Click to expand...

You might need to go reconsider that because you are totally misinformed.

It's brilliant and not stupid. SSDs in RAID0 are awesome for speed considering that SSDs don't have the failure rates of mechanical drives because there are no moving parts. The mean time before failure of SSDs is in the millions of hours while the MTBF failure of mechanical drives is in the hundreds of thousands only. Since you have 4x128, and if you assume 2 million hours of MTBF, that's 500,000 hours at least of MTBF collectively which is somewhat equivalent to any single mechanical drive.

If he really cared about protection, 4x128GB is only 0.5TB. He can easily buy one or two 500GB green drive as backup protection and automate it to backup when he's sleeping. I say automated backup and not RAID with the SSDs (as in RAID 0+1) because having the mechanical in the RAID array as mirroring would slow the whole thing down in realtime usage. Best bet is to set up two 500GB drives in RAID1 for automated nightly backup.
 
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