Blue pill or red pill?

M

MrCrispy

2[H]4U
Joined
May 14, 2007
Messages
4,001
or to put it another way - should I enter the Matrix? Intel Matrix raid i.e. :)

I have 4 500gb disks and a part of me really wants to do it I can have a fast OS partition in RAID 0 and a RAID 5 partition with the security of knowing the data will always be online. All the critical data will be backed up on a bunch of old ide's and smaller disks lying around.

And yet, I've never had a hard disk crash at home (had one on my desktop at work) and my pc is on 24x7, so is it worth losing almost 500gb worth of space. Raid is something I've never had a reason to play with before, but the new Intel chips make it very attractive.
 
for everyday use you won't see any benefits from RAID. RAID is not a substitute for backup PERIOD.

That said, I have matrix RAID in my everyday use box.
RAID 0 for everything and a RAID1 for backup (yeah, I know)

I have this setup on two 74GB raptors and I'm pleased as punch.
 
I use raid 5 and 10 at home, Raid 10 for my games installation which gives me raid 0 like performance without the worry of loosing all data if a drive dies.
Raid 5 to store all my digital media, movies, music etc, raid 5 gives me the convenience of having 8 drives show up as single partition + even if a drive takes a crap on me my data is still online. Whether loosing 1 hdd worth of space (500gb in this case) is worth the convenience depends on your individual needs. If you only have 3 hdds ( minimum to do raid 5) then probably not but the more drives the more it makes sense ( like 8 in my case)
 
Snap to install, NP here, corrupted the array a couple of times messing with the OC and it it happly verified and corrected . Not going to win any speed records but robust and reliable, and plenty fast for day to day stuff.

Just keep in mind you cannot (at least on ICH8R) downgrade the array or convert it to a different type if memory serves me.

One thing I like is that if my board dies I dont have to worry about compatibily of a raid card in some other board. One does kinda get locked into an Intel chipset but I would rather be locked into that than a particular raid card.

Just to mention, looks like you know already, with Intel chipset raid 5 the max array size is 4 drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top