Raid 0 or Span disks in windows?

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AUGieDogie

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OK so I'm trying to get a larger hard drive for storage. My 3 TB drive is full so i picked up 2 WD 3TB red drives. I'm going to create one large drive from the both of them so that my file management is easier. So should i use my motherboard's controller to do a RAID 0 array? or should I just use windows 7 to span both disks to the large size?

I want the full six TB so that it will be easier to manage and back up.
I would also like the file transfer to be at least as fast as my current drives.

I'm leaning twords the windows spaning at the moment.

Thanks

AUG
 
I'd do neither unless you have a backup, simply striping or spanning without parity is really only doubling your chances for failure of the volume after 1 disk fails, which means having to restore everything instead of just the one failed disk. One way to go is pooling software (links below), that way if one disk fails it doesn't bring the whole volume down.

But if you do have a backup and the choice has to be either motherboard raid or windows striped/spanned volume, I'd go windows volume - for one its more portable if you move the volume between systems, and motherboard fakeraid has a habit of doing more harm than good, a lot of unsuspecting people have been left to bleed out in the street by it. Granted the newer intel based incarnations on motherboards of the last few years are a little more solid, but I personally avoid it - I would never lock my storage subsystem to a motherboard, unless that motherboard had breasts or made coffee (obviously).

http://liquesce.codeplex.com/ (Free)
http://www.poolit.com/ (Free for 2 disks)
http://drivebender.com
http://flexraid.com
 
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After reading what odditory wrote, I would third all of it. One other suggestion;

have you ever heard of softlinks? you can make a single drive

c:\stuff\videos1 ----> D:\videos2 (2TB disk1)
c:\stuff\videos2 ----> E:\videos2 (2TB disk2)

with mklink /d

If that will work for your organization scheme.

I would advise against RAID0 from your motherboard or drive pooling, instead maybe look at something like drive bender or flexraid, as mentioned. I'm using flexraid in a style that you're looking at doing, works fine, if there includes a small learning curve.

And always, always have backups.
 
I thought about using somthing like softlinks, but life would just be a whole lot easier to use the one disk.
After playing around with the raid on my mobo,(MaxumusFormula5) i decided that wasn't the way I wanted to go. I am just going to "span" it in windows 7.

I have discoverd that backup will be a pita. Acronis doesn't see the "dynamic drive" I have the free WD version, and have played with the "full" version. I guess i need to get the full+add on to see the spanned disk. Since they don't have a trial version of the add on i cant be 100% sure. I've been trying novaBackup, but it likes to crash my system. At least it is nice enough to do it after it finishes making the copies. (haven't tried a real backup yet just copies)

Thanks again
 
Why is everyone so against RAID0? I've been doing it for 7-8 years without a single failure to date. Just get yourself a large external or internal drive to backup important files. Its not that hard to re-install your OS and software in the event of a drive failure. No risk, no reward.

My .02
 
Since we're talking about storage drives, there is no reward anyway. And if you haven't had any failure I'd say you're not really qualified to recommend it, you only lived through the good.
 
Aesma said:
Since we're talking about storage drives, there is no reward anyway. And if you haven't had any failure I'd say you're not really qualified to recommend it, you only lived through the good.
Click to expand...

Sorry my point was geared towards R0 in general.

Hardware failure is inevitable, it will happen one day but so what? everyone should backup their data. A single drive can fail, what then? Will you start recommending everyone boot an OS from optical? Never store any data on hardware that can fail?
 
With two disks it is twice (or more) as likely to fail. RAID 0 adds additional complexity to a system and adds additional points of failure. With a solution like soft links or drive pooling software you can recover all the data on the disk that *didn't* fail immediately.

It's reminiscent of putting a turbo on on a car, but still having a 45 mph speed limit. Its going to make the car more likely to break down, give you performance you can't use 90% of the time, and you can say "Hey, I have a turbo on my car. Yeah.". But its not very practical.

We all agree that you should have backups and that its not that hard to re-install. It's still an few hours of work that you could avoid by not having one of two disks fail.
 
Yes you are doubling the chance of drive failure but, lets look at the actual number.
The average annual drive failure rate is : 0.70%-0.78%.

So the odds are : 1.48% that your system will fail in RAID0 (with 2 drives) versus 0.74% not in RAID.

Everyone see's DOUBLE you chances of drives failing and thinks " OMG " . I will take those odds everytime for even a little performance boost. Why do you think we overclock? Overclocking can also damage hardware and end in failure, but we do it for the performance boost and because we can.
 
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I have been running 2 x 2TB drives in span for media for years without issue.

I am, however, in the process of pricing out and specing a NAS that will run RAID5 for at least 1 drive redundancy. I can see the issues with both arguments.

If speed and size is all you want. Span it, but just know if something goes wrong the data on both drives is toast. So backups become your best friend.
 
Soldier101 said:
If speed and size is all you want. Span it, but just know if something goes wrong the data on both drives is toast. So backups become your best friend.
Click to expand...

True enough, but even a RAID5 installation should be backed up, at least I would do that.
 
x509 said:
True enough, but even a RAID5 installation should be backed up, at least I would do that.
Click to expand...

I learned this one the hard way about 5 years ago. I had raid 5 running 5 drives, then for no reason the raid card decided that i should have 2 arrays instead of just one. Presto 1tb gone forever.
 
AUGieDogie said:
I learned this one the hard way about 5 years ago. I had raid 5 running 5 drives, then for no reason the raid card decided that i should have 2 arrays instead of just one. Presto 1tb gone forever.
Click to expand...

AugieDogie,

We all learn this lesson the hard way. :( The really paranoid professional photographers I know about usually do two backups, on different drives.
 
phOkaz said:
Yes you are doubling the chance of drive failure but, lets look at the actual number.
The average annual drive failure rate is : 0.70%-0.78%.

So the odds are : 1.48% that your system will fail in RAID0 (with 2 drives) versus 0.74% not in RAID.
Click to expand...

You are quoting year 1 AFR specs - the jury is still out on whether the manufacturer's specs are truly representative here (some research suggests that this figure is actually several times higher), and in any case the AFR will increase as the drives age.

After several years you may find that the chances of failure are several orders of magnitude higher.
In any case, these are population stats - they don't really apply to individual units!


The bottom line is that striping and spanning are inherently more risky - for two disks, double the risk of failure, and double the data loss when that failure does happen!
As long as you accept these risks though...........
 
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