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For those with 1TB

M

MapleSyrupMods

Bring on Titan X Volta
Joined
Oct 3, 2002
Messages
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I would like to make a new setup, but need a little help as I don't know too much about RAID etc. I want to use one HDD for installed os, programs, games, and have the other's for Media, Music, Backups etc. What should I go with and should I use raid or not...too many questions.

Anyone that would care to help me out, I thank you in advance.
 
Raid is an uptime preservation and HDD redundancy tool, that is it. Repeat after me: RAID, while better than a single HDD, is not a backup.

Now that we have that out of the way. What is your budget and capacity goal?
 
A single drive for a boot drive is probably best. Then as many drives in whatever capacity you feel like, to achieve your capacity goal. As for a controller, I highly un-recommend anything onboard. Areca if you want speed, Highpoint if you want cheap. Consider your power supply and cooling requirements carefully - they're the difference between a nice storage machine and a large pile of expensive metal.

 
Well, for storage capacity, I was thinking somewhere around the 500+gb mark. I would like the drives to be as fast as possible, so I guess I better look into a PCI Raid controller. I will use this for gaming, storage and programming. Budget wise, I don't want to spend over $350.00 unless a little bit more is going to get me something that much better.
 
500 GB? Pssh. Get 2 500s (the WD5000KS or Seagate 7200.10 500GB would be fine choices) and use raid 1 on the motherboard. For raid 5, an external card is suggested; the integrated solutions are fine as long as you a) back up the array and b) don't plan to migrate the array intact to a new machine.

$350 will buy you a Highpoint card and one ~300GB disk, about half an Areca card, or two WD5000KS. The last, of course, is my suggestion ;)
 
If 500G of storage is all you are looking for then a pair of 500G drives in Raid1 will give you all the benefits of raid with none of the disadvantages.

UM hits the nail on the head, again.
 
ok, I was thinking more of two high performance 250gb hdd's and then get a good controller, would that perform better or no?
 
ATI9700Pro said:
ok, I was thinking more of two high performance 250gb hdd's and then get a good controller, would that perform better or no?
Click to expand...

Most likely the 250's will be an older drive and will perform somewhat slower, raid 0 would alleviate that in some access patterns, but then, you get total data loss if you lose a drive. Raid 1 w/ the 2x500GB is a pretty decent option.
 
Ok, I guess I should re-direct this question a little bit. What is my fastest option?
 
If you have some serious HD performance needs, you should be able to identify applications / operations that can represent benchmarks for those performance needs. Then you could try a couple of different configurations, e.g. on OS drive, on drive separate from OS, in RAID 0 separate from OS, with stripe size = 64K, stripe size = 32K, etc., to see what works best for you, and the size of the difference.

There are lots of permutations, and I guess the question is: Does RAID 0 do much for your application performance? Odds are that it won't, because HD-bound applications aren't common, esp. when you put the OS+swap on a separate spindle. If you saw the HD light on solid for long periods, while your CPU wasn't doing much, then you'd know that your application is HD-bound.

RAID 0 performance impact depends first on the application, and then on the HDs, stripe size, and somewhat on the controller. But the really fast caching controllers are out of your price range, and RAID 0's not that hard to implement well. Moreover any conventional PCI controller would be bottlenecked on the PCI bus in RAID 0, so you'd be better off with an on-board implementation than PCI for fast sequential transfers. PCIe is a way out.

Here's a suggested 4-drive setup for incorporating RAID 0:

1 small drive for OS.
2 mid-sized drives for programs and data in RAID 0.
1 large external drive for backups.

The obvious alternative would be to drop RAID 0 and go with a 3-drive setup. You could even start with that, and if you saw a HD bottleneck, then add another drive for RAID 0 -- backing up and restoring; not affecting your OS significantly.
 
2 500s in raid 1 or raid 0. Try it both ways and report back - I'm curious to see which you like better.

 
unhappy_mage said:
500 GB? Pssh. Get 2 500s (the WD5000KS or Seagate 7200.10 500GB would be fine choices) and use raid 1 on the motherboard. For raid 5, an external card is suggested; the integrated solutions are fine as long as you a) back up the array and b) don't plan to migrate the array intact to a new machine.

$350 will buy you a Highpoint card and one ~300GB disk, about half an Areca card, or two WD5000KS. The last, of course, is my suggestion ;)
Click to expand...


I would recommend the RE2 version of that WD drive

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101258-9

You may not think it, but I have personally seen a non-RS drive suffer from the whole TLER debacle in a simple RAID 0 and RAID 1 setup.

The WD RE drives are nice, and Seagate has some nice new "enterprise" SATA drives, however you will have to do a nice song and dance to convince me they are worth the extra $100 over the WDs.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101923

EDIT: Damn that is a nice price on those RE2 drives...after I posted I started thinking about the price of the seagate vs the WD, and it just hit me, $2.94 per GB is a great deal.
 
I would also like to second the Areca is one of the, if not the best. I would also agree that high point is on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. There is a lot in between those two that i would probably spend a little more cash on and buy instead of the high point.
 
I'm partial to the 320GB WD SATA drives (WD3200JD) for their price (I just bought another one from zipzoomfly.com last night for 100 bucks, you can get 3 of those in a RAID 5 for pretty cheap.
 
hmmm, $170/500 = .34 per gigabyte, so that makes 2.94 GB/$1

learn2basic math :p

ninja edit: $2.94 / 1 GB
500GB * 2.94 = $1,470 a drive!

hey, i can sell you a couple of drive if you want :D
 
hardwarephreak said:
I would also like to second the Areca is one of the, if not the best. I would also agree that high point is on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. There is a lot in between those two that i would probably spend a little more cash on and buy instead of the high point.
Click to expand...
Like what? I'm interested in what you'd suggest. I wasn't suggesting that Highpoint is crap, just that it's cheap. But in any case it's irrelevant - the OP can't afford an addon raid card with that kind of budget.

The RE drives are probably a good idea, you're right. TBH, though, I'd tend toward a different manufacturer for stability reasons. I only recommended WD for performance reasons. Whatever you buy, figure out now how you're going to back it up.

 
unhappy_mage said:
Like what? I'm interested in what you'd suggest. I wasn't suggesting that Highpoint is crap, just that it's cheap.
Click to expand...

Well I wasn't trying to say they were crap, just that I have seen more problems with highpoint cards dropping arrays and doing other wierd crap. It wasn't an issolated incident either, but as always YMMV. I mean if they just put out crap, they wouldn't still be in business after all of these years...and in terms of picking up a PCI Express based controller that will still leave money left over for drives, the highpoint is really the only viable option.

I have seen some killer deals on cards from LSI, 3Ware, and Intel on ebay here as of late...I picked up a 2810SA for $200...so to the OP, keep your eyes out. Saw a nice 3Ware card for $225 a week later, but I had already bit on the Adaptec so....


unhappy_mage said:
Whatever you buy, figure out now how you're going to back it up.
.
Click to expand...

Absolutely key to the OP. Figure it out ahead of time, and budget for it.
 
3 WD 250GB drives in a RAID 5 will cost $225.

If you have a motherboard that supports RAID 5, this appears to be the best solution.

(Add a drive for a spare if you wish.)
 
Unless you want, y'know, performance. Or something that'll actually recover if you lose a drive. I haven't seen a single motherboard controller that does either of those reliably.

 
Ok, lets look at this then in a smaller HDD format. How about some WD Raptors in Raid, with a pci controller, then a external 250gb HDD.
 
Cell said:
Ok, lets look at this then in a smaller HDD format. How about some WD Raptors in Raid, with a pci controller.
Click to expand...
For under $350? With 500GB of capacity? By math, that's at least 3 150s and a pci controller card for under $350. Please send me a link to your store, I have some purchases to make.

 
Are you asking about a different scenario? A single 150gb raptor will be less complicated, and perform about the same as, a pair of 74s. That's my suggestion for performance with no regard to capacity.

A 150 and a 500 and an external backup disk will make a good storage system. But keep in mind - if it's plugged in, it's not backup ;)

 
Yea, I was thinking about going with a larger capacity drive by itself, yet still maintain a high data transfer speed. I was thinking a WD Raptor-X 150gb along with one external drive for all storage. Or should I be looking at an internal for storage?
 
No reason to get the Raptor X....The MTBF is less than the non windowed drive....and i think its more money too..:)
It might be just me, but I really have no use in seeing inside my drives :)
 
Oh, I didnt know they made a non-windowed version... I would gladly get that over the other one.
 
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