general storage comp.

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dtess17

2[H]4U
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Feb 7, 2005
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i've gone through an upgrade cycle and i will be taking my old computer and making it a more for general use and bulk storage. I will likely keep all my music, pics, and movies on this comp. I might do some light gaming and it will be used for day to day stuff like email and web surfing and what not.

I might want to access some files from this comp at times from other computers. If i can do that?

anyways what would be the best disk set up for such a comp? I was thinking maybe some type of RAID? Whatever would be best.
 
If you don't need a huge amount of storage go with a RAID-1 setup. It is basically two drives that mirror one another. If one fails, then you have the other with the data. Alternatively, you could use one drive and get a USB drive to back up to. You could do the backup once a month and keep it at work/parents house/etc, in case the machine fries, house burns, comp gets stolen, etc. You can easily share things over your home network.
 
general said:
If you don't need a huge amount of storage go with a RAID-1 setup. It is basically two drives that mirror one another. If one fails, then you have the other with the data. Alternatively, you could use one drive and get a USB drive to back up to. You could do the backup once a month and keep it at work/parents house/etc, in case the machine fries, house burns, comp gets stolen, etc. You can easily share things over your home network.
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The best would be a raid with an external drive as a backup drive or a tape drive or something if you really want to be safe. I'd personaly shoot for a raid 3 or 5 card if you can spare the extra cash. You don't loose as much space as you would with a raid 1 but would need a 3rd drive. Either way sharing the files off a network would be easy.
 
i was looking into raid 5, 1, 0+1. they are all supported right on my MB. I don't think i really feel like buying an extra card, although from what i understand raid 10 is very nice also.
i still don't 100% understand raid 5...0+1 seems to be my best choice at the moment.

i will need a pretty fair amount of storage...i am getting close to 80gigs in music, and i have no clue how much video i have but it's up there.
i have a couple of those 250WD drives laying around...and i have no issue picking up one or two more. 1TB of storage sounds badass to me.

but if people have suggestions i am open. this is a good learning experience for me.
hell i never even did a raid 0 till like a year or two ago...i like trying different things.
 
How much storage space do you need? Also, my suggestion for the external USB drive was based on cost. Not everyone wants to spend a lot of money fixing up an old machine. If you have less than 500Gb of data to store then RAID-1 would be fine. It will greatly limit any chance of data being corrupted. If you need more space, then you'll either need to go with 2 RAID-1 arrays or a RAID-5 array. Getting a RAID-5 card is great, but it comes at a price. How about you put forward what you want to store and how much you have to spend.
 
I wouldn't call it an "old machine"
it;s an Asus A8n SLI Premium, 3200+, 2gigs of ram, and a 7800gt

the hard drives that hold my data have been taken out in the process of the new build so i don;t know how much video i have but i gotta think i'm somewhere in the 200 range . Music I have somewhere in the 80gig range. But both of those will be growing very quickly. I also have various pics, and documents.


right now i have them on like 3-4 different disks,a few 80gigs and a 200
i was looking to make better use of my larger hard drives. As i said i picked up a couple of the new SE16 drives from WD.

In terms of mudget i could spend maybe another 100-200 more for this but that's about it. Basically i could get another hard drive or two.

And my mobo does support raid 5
 
Do you have a gigabit switch and gigabit on the clients? RAID 10/0/0+1/etc. wouldn't be useful for performance across the network without gigabit.
 
If by RAID 5+1 you mean RAID5 + hotspare, good idea. If you mean RAID51 (two mirrored RAID 5 arrays) I think that is MORE than overkill, because he'd lose more than 50% of his space. 6 drives in RAID51 = capacity of TWO!
 
drizzt81 said:
If by RAID 5+1 you mean RAID5 + hotspare, good idea. If you mean RAID51 (two mirrored RAID 5 arrays) I think that is MORE than overkill.
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Hehe whats wrong with overkill :p
no i meant the Raid5 +
 
i see alot of people saying i should go for RAID 5...what is the main benefit of that...how many drives will i need.

i think i'm gonna end up using my 250SE16 drives...i have two, and i can buy two more for cheap.
 
the main benefit of Raid-5 is a balanced level of reliability, read-speed and capacity. You will need at least 3 drives and will have N-1 * sizeof(smallest disk) space available to use. The array can withstand a single HDD failure, but a Virus, the DEL key or Windows can still easily kill your data. The read speed should be close to min( bus_speed, (N - 1) * speed to drive) for local read and min(network_speed, network to HDD buspseed, (N - 1) * speed to drive).

Write speeds should be near the speed to writing to a single disk, but vary GREATLY from controller to controller.
 
dtess17 said:
i see alot of people saying i should go for RAID 5...what is the main benefit of that...how many drives will i need.

i think i'm gonna end up using my 250SE16 drives...i have two, and i can buy two more for cheap.
Click to expand...
Raid5 needs at least 3 drives. Capacity of the arrays is (Number of drives - 1)*capacity of drives, so with 4 250gb drives in raid5 you'd get 750gb on the array. Benefit is redundancy - with raid5 if any one drive dies, the array stays online, and no data is lost as long as another drive does not fail before the first one is replaced. Performance will depend largely on the controller, but its usually comparable to a single drive, though a bit slower on the writes.
 
dtess17 said:
so this would be better than a 0+1 or two raid 1 arrays?
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what do you mean by "better"? Two RAID-1 array would have less capacity, but could withstand two HDDs failures, if the two failures are not on the same array. It is likely that RAID-1 will write a bit faster than RAID-5, but it depends on the implementation.
RAID 0+1 would likely have faster read and write STR and still less capacity than a RAID-5 array.
 
dtess17 said:
so this would be better than a 0+1 or two raid 1 arrays?
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RAID 0+1 or RAID 10 are largely pointless for home use. For a storage server over a network, size and redundancy are far bigger issues than performance. If you have more than two drives, RAID-5 is the most efficient use of the space while protecting the data.

Okay guys, now hit him RAID-6 and 3-drive RAID-1 setups.
biggrin.gif
 
don't hit me with anything! lol

by better i just mean for my useage.most speed and stability

so my raid 5 will have 750mb of storage (assuming 4x 250)and if one drive dies i'm still ok?
is this the most common type of set up for mass storage? i see people with like 4-8 drives and their sigs all the time. Always wondered how they set them up.
 
dtess17 said:
this is the most common type of set up for mass storage...i see people with like 4-8 drives and their sigs all the time. Always wondered how they set them up.
Click to expand...

I put the OS on one drive -- typically PATA, but not necessarily. If it's a big drive, then the space beyond the OS can be used for a secondary backup.

I have a 5-drive RAID 5 array on one machine, and a 4-drive RAID 0 array on another. The RAID 0 machine has a full backup of the RAID 5 array, and also a secondary backup of stuff I deem important on the rest of the OS drive (> 200 GB).

Performance is good (with gigabit connecting everything of course), but RAID 5 write performance is like voodoo, and I'd really like to get a much better understanding of that, so that I can potentially deploy even more of them at affordable prices. Even simpler than full understanding -- just a cheap and fast RAID 5 implementation, please. That's all!
 
so would it be a good idea to put the OS of some small drive and then make the array for all my storage?
 
dtess17 said:
so would it be a good idea to put the OS of some small drive and then make the array for all my storage?
Click to expand...

At very least make the array into 2 partitions with one being for the os. Personaly I would use a boot drive then have the array for data.
 
dtess17 said:
so would it be a good idea to put the OS of some small drive and then make the array for all my storage?
Click to expand...
yes. that would be a good idea.
 
well then...looks like things are shaping up well. Seems like RAID 5 is the way to go.

anything else i need to know or should be looking at?
 
dtess17 said:
so would it be a good idea to put the OS of some small drive and then make the array for all my storage?
Click to expand...
A common config for data servers is 5-6 drives: two small drives in RAID-1 for the OS, and 3-4 large drives in RAID-5 for the data. This keeps the OS away from the data and provides another layer of cushioning when a drive dies.

For home systems, don't bother with hot swap or hot spares. You can probably afford to turn the machine off to replace a drive.
 
RAID-5 is great, but you will still hear some gurus around here saying that you should back it up in case of data corruption. Anything that you can't replace should be backed up to more than one location.
 
sounds good. I'll get on picking up a few more drives this week.
i love this forum...learn something everyday
 
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