Controller Card?

[dangbrandon]

Hey guys i've composed of some new hdd's which is strictly backing up my hdd's of media.

i was wondering if i needed a controller card for this.

right now i have 2 Raid 0 setups of WD 1TB Blacks so a total of 4TB

i just bought another 2 hdd's hitachi 2TB totalling of 4TB

so the new hdd's are going to back up the 2 Raid 0 but first what should i do?

should i create a raid 0 with the hitachi and then use the 1tb WD blacks as back up?

or should i break down the 2 raid 0 setup and create 1 full 4tb and then keep the hitachi on a controller card.

there are many options to go but also wondering if i need a controller card. shooting for a raid 5

 

[BigXor]

Personally I would use the two Hitachi's as simple volumes for backup and not raid them. Raid 0 speed is not necessary for backup media.

 

[dangbrandon]

yeah i guess so but what if i picked up more hitachi drives?

 

[BigXor]

You will need a minimum of 4 drives of the same size to create a raid 5 array, bear in mind though that you will lose the equivalent of one drive to parity.
You will also need a PCIe controller capable of Raid 5.

If you plan to use them as simple volumes and need more ports than you will need some type of PCIe SATA controller.

 

[dangbrandon]

okay thanks. yeah i know i'll lose one. thanks again big xor i'll be working my way towards a raid 5 sooner or later. it is very much needed cause of hardware upgrades and controllers on motherboards always changing.

 

[Dangman]

Hey guys i've composed of some new hdd's which is strictly backing up my hdd's of media.

Just a FYI, it's not a true backup at all if the "backup drives" are in the same system where the actual data that needs to be backedup still resides. A backup is generally a seperate system altogether like an external hard drive, NAS, file server, online backup, another PC in the home, etc. Though for real true backup, the data should be kept offsite or online somewhere in the event of a fire or some other natural disaster. So keep that in mind with your data backup plan.

And just to add this: RAID IS NOT BACKUP! All it does is guarantee uptime of your data in the event of a hard drive crash/death. It does not protect against accidental or malicious deletion, modification, corruption, or infection of your data.

i was wondering if i needed a controller card for this.

right now i have 2 Raid 0 setups of WD 1TB Blacks so a total of 4TB

i just bought another 2 hdd's hitachi 2TB totalling of 4TB

so the new hdd's are going to back up the 2 Raid 0 but first what should i do?

I'd have to concur with BigXor in that you should keep your current Hitachti 2TB drives as single volumes for copied data.

there are many options to go but also wondering if i need a controller card. shooting for a raid 5

Depends on the OS you're planning on using with this RAID 5 array, whether or not performance is important, and what motherboard you have.

If you're using Windows and want high performance with RAID 5, you're basically looking at a $200+ true hardware RAID controller.

If you're using Windows and don't mind extremely low performance and semi-reliability, the onboard RAID chip of most new motherboards is sufficient. Though apparently the ICH10R RAID controller found on many new Intel mobos is supposedly one of the better ones.

If you're using Linux or some other non-Windows OS, more than likely you'll get high performance out of whatever software RAID solutions are available for that non-Windows OS regardless of the motherboard chosen.

You will need a minimum of 4 drives of the same size to create a raid 5 array

No you don't: The minimum amount of drives needed for RAID 5 is 3 drives. RAID 6, however, does have a minimum of 4 drives.

 

[RooK]

No you don't: The minimum amount of drives needed for RAID 5 is 3 drives. RAID 6, however, does have a minimum of 4 drives.

So, this is absolutely true. HOWEVER, since the amount of segments with 2TB drives is soooo many, raid-6 is recommended because your chance of rebuilding a RAID5 with 2TB drives and getting a corrupted stripe becomes very high.

Plus, the rebuild time would be insane... I'd recommend 1TB drives if you can't go SAS.

And do yourself a favor. Get a decent controller card and keep it up to date on firmware.

 

[drescherjm]

Plus, the rebuild time would be insane...

That depends on your raid subsystem. At work I have 8.5 hour rebuilds for a 9 drive (9 x 2TB hitachi 7k2000s) linux software raid 6 on a 3 year old core2quad. Cheap hw raid controllers without a BBU and an effective cache will take much longer to rebuild raid6.