2 WD Black 1TB drives in Raid 0 any Issues?

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prasvt

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I ordered two Western Digital Black 1 TB drives yesterday as a bit of an upgrade for my sig machine. Right now I've got two Seagate 250GB 7.2k drives in RAID 0 (using the Asus Maximus II's built in raid). I've got that array split 250/250 for WinXP x64 and Win 7x64 beta. I'll have my official Win 7 Pro x64 tomorrow'ish so I thought I'd upgrade the drives while doing the OS installs. Also have 2 500GB 7.2k drives for storage (1 WD, 1 Seagate).

I read somewhere that there may be problems running RAID with these Black drives now that WD has 1TB RE3 drives. Any truth to this? I saw the 1TB WD RE3 drives on newegg - $174 per drive seems a bit excessive for my purposes (now days, mostly blu-ray -> 720p/1080p encoding.

I'll be getting the drives tomorrow, but figured I should find out before I open 'em up and discover I can't run RAID 0 reliably.

Thanks!
 
I am running 2 WD 1 TB Blacks in Raid 0 and have no issues. I did enable WDTLER before setting up the array. Doing so ensures one disk won't drop out of the array. There's a thread in this sub-forum on it.
 
Aside from the risk of losing 2TB of data, no, I don't see any issues.

Do check your TLER like lodingi said.
 
I wouldn't run 2 x 1TB in a RAID 0. I suppose you can do a mix, like a 320GB partition out of the 1TB in a RAID 0 stripe, and put the rest into a RAID 1 mirror so you can have some semblance of data redundancy with the RAID 1 partition, but I wouldn't do 2 x 1TB RAID 0.
 
Wait, you can partition the drives and do a mix of RAID 0 and RAID 1? interesting.

What if I added a 3rd 1TB drive - RAID 5 would give me speed + redundancy right?
 
prasvt said:
Wait, you can partition the drives and do a mix of RAID 0 and RAID 1? interesting.

What if I added a 3rd 1TB drive - RAID 5 would give me speed + redundancy right?
Click to expand...

To answer your first question, yes you can on an Intel RAID, so if your motherboard has ICH9R or ICH10R, you would be able to specify a RAID 0 array of x size and use the remaining portion, y, for RAID 1 redundancy.

As for your second question, RAID 5 would be pretty slow for you without a good hardware controller, which is even more additional expense.

In my opinion, you're overcomplicating things. If you want sheer speed, get an SSD like the Intel X25-M. If you want storage space, just get a bunch of 1-1.5TB drives. If you want a lot of storage space, then you build a home server. Doing it the "poor man's" way isn't likely to work out well for you in the future, especially on onboard RAID controllers.
 
prasvt said:
Wait, you can partition the drives and do a mix of RAID 0 and RAID 1? interesting.

What if I added a 3rd 1TB drive - RAID 5 would give me speed + redundancy right?
Click to expand...


Yes & yes. I've done Raid 0 & Raid 1 on the same 2 drives.
 
Alright, well for now I'll try the RAID 0 and Raid 1 on the same 2 drives deal. Actually I do have a 3rd 1TB drive (seagate barracuda 32mb cache), so i was pondering whether that would be useful. But I suppose I should just let that be separate huh? My board does have a 2nd RAID controller (SiliconImage) that does array calcs in hardware, but only 2 ports for that.

An SSD would be ideal - but a bit expensive right now. Definitely in the next 6 months though.

Okay well thanks for the input guys - always a learning experience :)
 
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