Building a computer, I need raid advice Raid 5 vs 6 / mobo vs controller.

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kuranei

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My planned build:

CPU: i7 3770k
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth z77
GPU: 7970 (likely the MSI lightning)
Ram: Samsung 30nm 4x4GB (will OC to 1800s) *purchased*
Case: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow edition
PSU: SeaSonic ax750 *purchased*
OS: Windows 8 pro (can do 7)
Hard drives:
OS / active games drive: 256 GB samsung 830 (or 840).
Temp file / download dirrectory: 1 TB WD Caviar black or a 600 GB WD raptor (which would you recomend?)
Raid array for data storage: 3-5 HDDs in the raid, looking at maybe a raid 5.

I hope to have some security (redundancy) for the data thus: raid 5 or 6, my problem is I am not sure how good the on board raid controller would be, plus the raid interface would only be sata II (3 Gb/s) would this slow down drives like WD reds?

This makes me almost want to get a good raid controler, but $500 is a little costly. How much would I stand to gain from getting a raid controller? What one woudl you recomend if you suggest the hardware route.

I would love comments on my build / suggestions about the hard drives. I will have important data backed up on externals / flash drives; however, it would be a pain if the raid were to die. I plan to have mainly music, movies, and not comonly played game on the raid.
 
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raid 5 is dead. especially with 1T + drives

Raid 6 or raid 10 if you need performance

raid 6 = crap write speeds on any low end controllers, even some high end with SATA drives = write will be crap.

onboard raid for 0 or 1 is fine, raid 5/6/60 et cetera, get a real raid card.
 
A raid controller is interchangeable across setups; a huge advantage if you ever intend on moving the setup around. I personally only use software RAID in my setup, so I can't give you much more of an opinion than that.
 
Hmm, I usually stick with my computer for 5-7 years (with minor upgrades, ie graphics card).

I am fine with slow write speeds to the data storage drive since I will be saving most the data / files to the WD caviar black / raptor drive.

SO onboard raid 5 is a no go? It would mainly be for my steam games I don't play often / music archive / movie / anime archive, so access speeds are more important since I iwll stream through other devices on my network (HTPC laptop).

If you suggest a card for raid 5 or higher, what one would you recommend? Mind you, if i get a raid card I would want to have a raid 6 setup.

What problems might I run into if I do a raid 5 on my motherboard? Slower write / read times? Increased chance of disk failure? *note if mobo dies, I will replace with the same model*

I am looking at the 2-3 TB WD red drives for the raid setup (5 drives total).
 
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Do you really need RAID5? Best practice would require a regular backup to at least different drives (better: different system, even better: different site) anyway, so you could omit the RAID and just use the plain disks.
Cheap controllers capable of RAID5/6 are usually just HBAs that calculate the RAID parity on the host CPU (i.e. LSI 9240-8i). Don't use the Intel RST onboard RAID5, it's just calling for problems and really slow.
 
^+1

RAID can actually end up causing more problems than it solves.
Reasons to use RAID:
1. You need uptime even in the face of a drive failure. Note this is not to protect data this is to protect UPTIME.
2. You need a volume larger than a single drive can provide. Even with large blu-ray rip collections this is not normally a need.
3. You need more IOPS than a single drive can provide.

Reason NOT to use RAID:
1. You think it is for backups.

I can not stress this enough and many people have already stated this. RAID != BACKUPS not even remotely close to backups.
 
I could also go with a couple individual 3TB HDDs to store / access data on.
Downtime would get annoying (but not the end of the world), and I don't want to have to have 6+ TB of external drives storing all my data as a back up (if I had a raid setup, I would only have to back up the very important files, ~1 TB worth).
Would individual drives be faster than a raid 5 through mobo at accessing the data? I can accept the slower write times, but it was my understanding you would have faster read times.

What problems can a raid cause? What problems would I run into if I did the raid 5 through the mobo, what problems would I run into / avoid if I were to do a raid 5/6 through a cheaper PCIe raid controller? and Finally what problems would I run into / avoid if I went with one of the higher end PCIe raid controllers for raid 5/6?

Thank you guys so much for your help. I guess my whole goal would be to have the least work needed if a HDD fails, in addition it would provide a reasonable amount of security for my data, again not the end of the world should I lose it, but would be very annoying / time consuming.
 
Problems that RAID can cause.
Depending on how you raid you could have these issues:
1. Data is not portable between systems, if using a MB raid solution you are stuck with that MB if you lose the MB and want your RAID data then you need to find a MB with the same RAID implementation.
2. It is more complex, complexity always make for more failure points. Raid controllers have been known to actually cause data corruption.

I do not understand how having RAID would reduce the amount of data you would need to backup. You understand RAID != BACKUP in any form or fashion.
 
Raid5 on a 3 drive intel setup works fine, I can plug them in to any intel chipset mothboard and it picks it up fine :shrug: Performance isn't even all that bad, better than an individual drive. I just have it set up that way so that if one drive dies my stuff is fine and still accessible.... Yes the important stuff is backed up before the trolls read that the wrong way.
 
Is data on a raid 5/6 more secure (less likely to be lost) than data on a single drive? My understanding is that it was (although nothing is guaranteed). I just felt as though I would not need to back up all data if it was on a raid with parity / redudancy. I would certainly back up the important family phots / movies , documents, etc (the ones I would never want to lose) on external drives. While the games / programs / movie archives (I have the disks to re-install / reburn if the files are lost) wouldn't require a backup.

So if I go with the mobo raid controler, you would recommend a raid 1, or raid 10 only? (for data security with some extra storage). If I have all the data double backed-up on externals, I may even do a raid 0 for speed.

If I am willing to spend $400-$600 for a solid raid controler, would a raid 6 be a better option? I like the concept of parity, and would love to learn more about raid setups in the process. However; I do realize this would be overkill for my purposes, which is why I wanted to learn more about the differences / risks between the mobo raid and the PCIe raid controller.

I guess given what I have said, I will likely need at least 5 TB of active data storage (10 TB would be ideal for a longer lasting setup). I will have games, programs, applications, movies on these drives, they will be shared through a network, and will have other devices accessing / streaming them.

What would you recommend?

1. 2 x 3 TB HDDs no raid. (add more as needed, but backing up most files)
2. 4 x 3 TB HDDs Raid 10 mobo controller (backing all important files / things that I can't lose)
3. 5 x 3 TB HDDs Raid 5 mobo controller (from what I have gathered this is a no)
3. 5-6 x 3TB HDDs Raid 6 with a solid PCIe x4/8 raid controller.

Thank you again.
 
Wether RAID is a good choice depends on what you consider the highest threat to your data. Is it really the loss of a drive? Or accidential deletion/overwriting? RAID if properly implemented has not really any drawbacks except cost. I would not consider RAID6 with less than 6 drives, to much wasted space. However, some hardware controllers provide the option of capacity extension by adding more drives, if you consider adding drives later you can start with a 4 drive RAID6.

If you do not want to buy a dedicated controller, IMHO the best option is to use RAID1 for the important data (so you can continue working with the data in case of a failed drive) with daily backups and store the less important data on plain drives.

My current setup is:
Desktop 1x 256GB SSD for OS and applications, 1x 3TB 7200rpm HDD for Steam.
Fileserver 4x 3TB WD RED RAID5 (will be upgraded to 8x 3TB RAID6 soon) storage with nightly backups to a 8x 2TB RAID6. I use linux software raid which is rock-stable and can even be used on any system with just a live-cd. The last drive I lost was an IBM Deathstar. Ironically, since I use RAID on a larger scale I have not lost a single drive.
This setup is not perfect yet, the backup server should be a separate system.
 
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Very true omniscence, if I were to setup a true data backup system I would use a NAS in raid 6. However, the data I have does not warrant it as a necessity (only the occasional backups to a couple externals / flash drive for documents). I am mainly looking at a raid to avoid having to re-install / re-download all my games / programs.

I had a raid 0 for 6 years before one drive died. Lost a couple anime series, but I had the important data on an external.

I was interested in Raid 5/6 since it would add a level of protection (at least from a failing drive), while delivering a decent performance increase. I would like to be able to play a game and have something streamed to my TV from the same drive without issue.

I will have Windows 8 as my main OS, and would likely use the internal mobo raid controllers for it. Would a 5 disk 3TB red drive array run better than 2-3 individual drives in the sense of streaming a movie while playing a game / transferring files?

1. Would it be better to stick with single drives? Perhaps Raid 0 for games, and a single drive for movies?
2. Or would Raid 5 provide enough of an increase in performance with reduced chance of a failed drive knocking out my data to be worth it?
3. How much faster would a Raid 6 with solid controller be than the other options?
 
kuranei said:
I will have Windows 8 as my main OS, and would likely use the internal mobo raid controllers for it. Would a 5 disk 3TB red drive array run better than 2-3 individual drives in the sense of streaming a movie while playing a game / transferring files?

1. Would it be better to stick with single drives? Perhaps Raid 0 for games, and a single drive for movies?
2. Or would Raid 5 provide enough of an increase in performance with reduced chance of a failed drive knocking out my data to be worth it?
3. How much faster would a Raid 6 with solid controller be than the other options?
Click to expand...

I would say the needs of the average home user is easily starting to mimic that of a small business. My HTPC for example has about 50 BR Movies and 100 DVD quality movies. I don't care what kind of backup exists (I have tape) it's not fun pulling anything from backup. Uptime matters. In fact before I upgraded my HTPC's local storage one of the hard drives had died. Had I not had it in RAID 1 I would have had to reinstall or reimage the whole thing. Sorry that would suck.

When it comes to today's perferred RAID (5 or 6), Raid 6 is preferred for any drive 1TB and up.

I can also tell you that RAID 6 on software unless we are talking mdadm or ZFS will be largely slower than a dedicated RAID card.
 
My 4 disk RAID5 can push ~280 MB/s on reads, the 8 disk RAID6 about 600 MB/s. With a quality hardware RAID you may see even higher rates. If you ask about movie streaming, that will not exceed 5 MB/s normally. The sequential speed is however not the main advantage of a hardware controller. Those controllers usually have much more features than a mainboard raid. If your system crashes (happens occasionally with gaming systems) the controller will almost always leave the raid in a consistent state while the mainboard raid may not. The best option for the game drive would be an SSD, it is much faster than a RAID0 with harddisks. You already planned that, a RAID0 is unneccessary in that case as well as a drive for temp files unless you do excessive raw video editing.

If you do not plan to run regular backups choose RAID6 over RAID5 with 3TB drives. Even if left alone a rebuild will take about 8 hours. I assume you will not have a cold spare, so using RAID5 would be reckless. If you ask the average user running a RAID5 at their desktop what they will do in case of a drive failure, they answer that they will order a new drive, meaning they put around 50% more load on their remaining drives (which are probably from the same batch as the failed one) for half a week. If one of those drives fails during that time the data is usually completely lost without an expensive recovery service.
 
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I am mainly looking at a raid to avoid having to re-install / re-download all my games / programs.

If this is the case, I'd simply image the OS drive/partition once a week (restoring an image is pretty easy) and use Win8's Storage Spaces feature to protect your data from drive failure.

However, with a 256GB SSD, if you have a lot of data in a second partition (or even if you use a single partition on the OS drive and it's pretty full), then mirroring might make sense, as restoring a 200GB+ image can take a while (though only a few hours). You'd need a second SSD to mirror to though - technically you could mirror the SSD to a standard drive, but you'd then lose the performance benefit of using an SSD in the first place.
Mirroring the OS drive on a desktop system is only partially effective though - it will protect against drive failure of course, but my own experience is that just as many (maybe more) systems are trashed by corruption/virus/user error/non-disk related hardware failure etc, and mirroring won't help you there!

Personally I wouldn't even entertain the idea of any raid but mirroring using the motherboard controller.

If you don't like Storage Spaces for whatever reason, you could also consider Snapraid for your data drives, a free snapshot raid utility.


As for the TEMP file, it depends how big you need - if it's only a few GB, I'd use a ram drive (very fast)!
I'd just store downloads on the storage spaces data pool!
 
Bear in mind when they say "slow write times" they're not saying "you'll get 200MB/s read and 100MB/s write" it's more like "you'll get 200MB/s read and 5-10MB/s write", it's really really REALLY slow.
 
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