Benifits of RAID?

J

jake21

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 3, 2005
Messages
351
Im in the process of building a new gaming rig and I have never used any type of RAID storage.

What are the benefits of going with RAID? And which type of RAID is the best to use?

Thanks in advance,
~Jake
 
You gain speed, uptime, or both. There is no 'best' RAID level. Each one has its purpose and place.
 
but if you ain't going to use ssd, don't bother with raid 0

and if you are going to use nvidia, don't bother with any raid at all. all my nv raids fail after awhile.
 
Why wouldn't you go with RAID? Storage is cheep and if/when your hard drive goes bad and you loose all of your "videos" because you don't back them up. That would be a bad day.

What hard drives do you have price out in your build?
 
Luzer said:
Why wouldn't you go with RAID? Storage is cheep and if/when your hard drive goes bad and you loose all of your "videos" because you don't back them up. That would be a bad day.

What hard drives do you have price out in your build?
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As of right now i have one WD Caviar Black 640GB and hopefully upgrading to a second here soon, possibly a WD Caviar Black 1TB
 
So Ideally, id probably just want to go with RAID 1 for my system. I dont care about speeding up write speeds or paralleling them or anything, i just want backup.
 
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RAID IS NOT BACKUP

I've lost count the number of times my raid 1 has failed, and it doesn't fail nicely. before it actually fails you can degraded performance. its degraded to the point where the computer is unusable and you might as well just pull one hard drive off and hope that is the good one.

what I do now instead is just install the two hard drives separately and have a script that backs up my data to the other drive.
 
Pyrolistical said:
*

RAID IS NOT BACKUP

I've lost count the number of times my raid 1 has failed, and it doesn't fail nicely. before it actually fails you can degraded performance. its degraded to the point where the computer is unusable and you might as well just pull one hard drive off and hope that is the good one.

what I do now instead is just install the two hard drives separately and have a script that backs up my data to the other drive.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, so should i even go with raid at all?
what about for an HTPC that will store numerous movie files?
 
jake21 said:
Hmmm, so should i even go with raid at all?
what about for an HTPC that will store numerous movie files?
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You either do what I do, or backup to an external drive.

But you have to ask yourself do you REALLY care about those movies files? I don't care if I lose everything as I can just re-download everything.
 
Pyrolistical said:
You either do what I do, or backup to an external drive.

But you have to ask yourself do you REALLY care about those movies files? I don't care if I lose everything as I can just re-download everything.
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Very true. Ill have to think about it. I'm not to worried about losing them. I think ill just stick with a regular old harddrive setup
 
Pyrolistical said:
I've lost count the number of times my raid 1 has failed, and it doesn't fail nicely. before it actually fails you can degraded performance. its degraded to the point where the computer is unusable and you might as well just pull one hard drive off and hope that is the good one.

what I do now instead is just install the two hard drives separately and have a script that backs up my data to the other drive.
Click to expand...

Though I agree with you - if you're looking for backup a scheduled sync makes a lot more sense - your RAID setup is clearly broken if you have that kind of trouble. This isn't representative of a properly configured RAID.

The problem with the backup approach is that when you're dealing with large amounts of data that would be painful but not deadly to lose, it's just not worth the cost of having a complete duplicate. Parity RAID offers the ability to weather a drive failure without losing all your data, while not costing anything close to twice as much for an equivalent amount of storage. It's a minimal expenditure that safeguards your data against one common failure mode, and worthwhile in a lot of home situations IMO.

OP: A periodic sync has some real advantages over a RAID1 setup in your situation. It's also easier and less failure prone to set up. Just schedule a task to run robocopy or rsync between your disks every night and you're done.
 
keenan said:
Though I agree with you - if you're looking for backup a scheduled sync makes a lot more sense - your RAID setup is clearly broken if you have that kind of trouble. This isn't representative of a properly configured RAID.
...
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Yes and no.

I was using NV raid 1 and regular consumer drives which were not designed for raid, but then if you think about it defeats the "inexpensive" part of RAID. So you tell me, what is "properly configured"?
 
Pyrolistical said:
I was using NV raid 1 and regular consumer drives which were not designed for raid, but then if you think about it defeats the "inexpensive" part of RAID. So you tell me, what is "properly configured"?
Click to expand...

I have no trouble at all with multiple software RAID setups I've used. Even Intel Matrix RAID seems to be fairly foolproof in RAID1, but I avoid fakeraid as much as possible. Regardless, my point is that the problem is not with the *idea* of RAID, but whatever implementation you were using. It's possible to have a RAID that doesn't have those issues.
 
i would and have run RAID 1 for OS and then I would and have run RAID 5 for uptime for data storage with an external large drive for backup.

so for you..... run RAID 1 with the 2 drives and then have a 1.5-2TB drive in an external that you backup an image of the RAID 1 to and then backup actual files to the external 1 a week.
 
keenan said:
OP: A periodic sync has some real advantages over a RAID1 setup in your situation. It's also easier and less failure prone to set up. Just schedule a task to run robocopy or rsync between your disks every night and you're done.
Click to expand...

I've become a big fan of IdleBackup.
 
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