Raid 5 and storage questions

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OlIv0rIolI

Gawd
Joined
Dec 2, 2005
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Hi, l am a desktop user and I want to set up a big storage drive. I am paranoid about hd failures when it comes to my data, regardless of how unprecious the data may seem to most people, so I want to set up a raid 5 system since from what I understand its the safest before going crazy with raid 6. The biggest problem I have is that if I lose my data due to hd failure it would be hard to impossible to replace it. I am storing HDmovies, regular movies, tv shows, music, more entertainment stuff, and most important of all engineering applications iso files and work files. most of it is just for storage purpose. once the files are written there, they will mostly be just read from the storage

I currently have a gigabyte p35 dq6 motherboard with its own raid 5 controller based on ich9r chipset. http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2637
I currently only have up to 1.5tb of personal data to store. and I am going to keep adding to it over the next 6month. I plan to buy 4 * 1tb seagate 7200.11 drives to set it up. so that is 3tb of actual storage.

First question: is this setup a good idea?

Second: is the motherboard controller reliable for this setup? if not which dedicated raid controller should I buy/look for? ( i have no prior experience with dedicated raid controllers)

Third: If I want to expand the size of the raid at a later time, can I add a hard drive and get all the data already stored in the setup to automatically "redistribute" over the new drive?

Fourth: If lets say after I stored the data on the raid drive and then reformated the OS drive. Will the data on the raid be lost ( this might be the case if I go with the onboard controller or in the case that the raid controller failed/required windows driver recognition)?

Fifth: As it always happens, eventually everyone needs to upgrade their pc, so if and when I do, will I be able to move this 4*1tb drive to a new system unscathed? ( this is right now not that big of a concern)

I am running windows xp pro, my system sig is at the bottom. I will also at a later time partition for Vista Ultimate(will Vista see and run this raid drive?)
 
I will say RAID 5 is a good idea. You will want a hardware RAID 5 card though. If you don't have one, the load is on your CPU, and it will be slower. I'll let someone else recommend one, I'm not sure what the current best it. If you get hot swappable parts and have a drive failure, you can just replace the failed drive and never even have to shut down.
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
Hi, l am a desktop user and I want to set up a big storage drive. I am paranoid about hd failures when it comes to my data, regardless of how unprecious the data may seem to most people, so I want to set up a raid 5 system since from what I understand its the safest before going crazy with raid 6. The biggest problem I have is that if I lose my data due to hd failure it would be hard to impossible to replace it. I am storing HDmovies, regular movies, tv shows, music, more entertainment stuff, and most important of all engineering applications iso files and work files. most of it is just for storage purpose. once the files are written there, they will mostly be just read from the storage

I currently have a gigabyte p35 dq6 motherboard with its own raid 5 controller based on ich9r chipset. http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2637
I currently only have up to 1.5tb of personal data to store. and I am going to keep adding to it over the next 6month. I plan to buy 4 * 1tb seagate 7200.11 drives to set it up. so that is 3tb of actual storage.

First question: is this setup a good idea?

Second: is the motherboard controller reliable for this setup? if not which dedicated raid controller should I buy/look for? ( i have no prior experience with dedicated raid controllers)

Third: If I want to expand the size of the raid at a later time, can I add a hard drive and get all the data already stored in the setup to automatically "redistribute" over the new drive?

Fourth: If lets say after I stored the data on the raid drive and then reformated the OS drive. Will the data on the raid be lost ( this might be the case if I go with the onboard controller or in the case that the raid controller failed/required windows driver recognition)?

Fifth: As it always happens, eventually everyone needs to upgrade their pc, so if and when I do, will I be able to move this 4*1tb drive to a new system unscathed? ( this is right now not that big of a concern)

I am running windows xp pro, my system sig is at the bottom. I will also at a later time partition for Vista Ultimate(will Vista see and run this raid drive?)
Click to expand...
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random thoughts:
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have you checked raid3 ??? raid 10?
somewhere on these forums is a comparison of hardware controllers post-in-thread. GOOD
my guess is you'd want a hardware controller with BBU (no raid here yet)
do you have offsite backups? that is usually a priority before raid and with tested**restore
....................................
 
1. The setup is a good idea as long as you don't think that RAID is a backup solution. It's great for storage and redundancy, but I'd look at something else for backup, just in case. RAID doesn't protect against viruses, accidental deletions, etc.

2. Intel's controller handles RAID 5 fine. I'm using a RAID 5 on an ICH7, so ICH9 should do the trick nicely. If you want a hardware controller, they're expensive.

3. I don't think Intel allows for adding in drives. Other controllers might though.

4. The RAID and the OS drive are completely separate. You can format your OS drive all you want and the RAID is never affected.

5. I don't think you can move your RAID to another computer, unless it's an identical motherboard. I really have no idea though. For all I know, you can move it to any ICH9 or any Intel controller that supports RAID.

mattrickulater
 
Offsite backup is gonna be too pricy if he has a lot of data.
I would suggest doing a RAID 5 array and possibly with a hot spare.
Get a hardware based raid card for the array.
 
mattrickulater said:
1. The setup is a good idea as long as you don't think that RAID is a backup solution. It's great for storage and redundancy, but I'd look at something else for backup, just in case. RAID doesn't protect against viruses, accidental deletions, etc.

2. Intel's controller handles RAID 5 fine. I'm using a RAID 5 on an ICH7, so ICH9 should do the trick nicely. If you want a hardware controller, they're expensive.

3. I don't think Intel allows for adding in drives. Other controllers might though.

4. The RAID and the OS drive are completely separate. You can format your OS drive all you want and the RAID is never affected.

5. I don't think you can move your RAID to another computer, unless it's an identical motherboard. I really have no idea though. For all I know, you can move it to any ICH9 or any Intel controller that supports RAID.
Click to expand...

80% agreed. On point (5), Intel RAID has a good history of forwards portability (i.e. you can probably move it to another board with ICH9R implementation or ICH10x or whatever down the road. Of course, there are no solid guarantees about the future.

Point (3) is the biggest problem with Intel's implementation. However, if you have a full backup, as you should, it's somewhat moot -- you could drop the array, recreate it to a larger size, and then re-populate from backup.

Hard drives generally give the best GB/$ storage, so backing up at this size on a budget generally means using more drives.

If you can't back up the entire array, you should at least back up the most important parts externally.
 
2. Intel's controller handles RAID 5 fine. I'm using a RAID 5 on an ICH7, so ICH9 should do the trick nicely. If you want a hardware controller, they're expensive.

:rolleyes: ohh really... i originally intended on running raid5 on my ICH8R and it was slow as garbage in raid5... its quite capable of raid0 or raid10 for that matter... but raid5 it supports it, but the write speed is just pathetic
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
I will say RAID 5 is a good idea. You will want a hardware RAID 5 card though. If you don't have one, the load is on your CPU, and it will be slower. I'll let someone else recommend one, I'm not sure what the current best it. If you get hot swappable parts and have a drive failure, you can just replace the failed drive and never even have to shut down.
Click to expand...

Hot swappable parts? like a usb external drive?

my guess is you'd want a hardware controller with BBU (no raid here yet)
Click to expand...

What is BBU?

Offsite backup is gonna be too pricy if he has a lot of data.
I would suggest doing a RAID 5 array and possibly with a hot spare.
Get a hardware based raid card for the array.
Click to expand...

hot spare?

I look up at some of the raid controllers on newegg.com and they range anywhere from tens to hundreds of dollars, kind of hard to make the right selection. Plus how good is the ICH9r chipset controller compared to those?
 
Personaly I would go with a hardware raid controller. I have just had much better luck with them over the years. Also a software raid can really take a hit on system resources when you write to it.

You can get a good raid controller starting around 300 bucks new. I would go that route.
 
gaspah said:
well here's the 4-port.. on special too... $283.99 ;)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003&Tpk=arc-1210

i would recommend areca over most everything else

personally, i'd get the 8-port.. for future expansion.. but if you have no intention of expanding... get the 4-port..
Click to expand...

I read some newegg reviews, and it seems that because this card is x8 and the second pci express on my mobo is x4, the card is limited to x4 and it is going to max at 200mb/s. Is this a problem
also just to confirm, does this card beep loudly during boot up?
 
As someone else pointed out, RAID is not a backup solution, it is an uptime protection solution. Sudden catastrophic mechanical/electrical failure (meaning it can't be yanked and recovered from another machine) of a disk is probably one of the least likely ways to lose data. If your principle concern is about data loss then you should be doing images/backups to external or removable HDD drives or tape drives.
 
I do backups on the most important files and secondary files, but with the amount of data that I have, its becoming more and more impractical to do backups. Backing it to an external drive is nice and all but I can't use that drive for something else and it essentially becomes like a raid 1 solution. I am trying to get the maximum space size with minimum loss to parity and backups. Basically best bang for the buck. It cost a lot to use essentially only half your total storage space.

I am paranoid and I am on a budget. ( I like this phrase, i think I should trademark it lol)

I will buy a ups for the power outage and get some virus protection for extra measure.
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
I read some newegg reviews, and it seems that because this card is x8 and the second pci express on my mobo is x4, the card is limited to x4 and it is going to max at 200mb/s. Is this a problem
also just to confirm, does this card beep loudly during boot up?
Click to expand...

my mobo GA-965P-DS3P has only a 4x slot... it runs sweet no issues :p 4 whole lanes of pcie bandwidth is PLENTY!!

oh yes it beeps (loud but probably not enough to wake someone sleeping in the same room).. couldnt figure how to turn it off... beeps twice usually on startup..
 
Personally, I'd do hardware RAID5 on an Areca board (gaspah's recommendation is right on the money). The benefits are offloaded processing and the ability to migrate the array to a new system should it ever be necessary (my old IDE RAID5 has resided in three different systems to date). I don't know why RAID50 was suggested, since that seems overzealous to me (same with RAID6, and RAID3 isn't really seen in the wild so much).

As others have pointed out, this doesn't negate the need for regular backup. RAID ensures that the data remains accessible in the event of a single drive failure, but there are plenty of scenarios that would still result in data loss.
 
devman said:
RAID is not a backup solution
Click to expand...
Yep 100% true... I backup everything to DVD regularly and I database my backups.

devman said:
Sudden catastrophic mechanical/electrical failure of a disk is probably one of the least likely ways to lose data.
Click to expand...
I've had plenty of drives fail from both power and mechanical issues, over the years i've lost 100s of GB of data and important irriplacable data... why the heck would I go and dump AU$2k (total drives/card) on a storage system when I can just replace everything from DVD? well when you look at my dvd backup archive of well over 400 4.5GB DVDs all databased with no repeats and you think of sitting there feeding in all those discs, i start to cry. it was bad enough burning them.

plus i like having a large 2.8TB volume that i can organise all my files how i like insted of all over the place... raid5 is fantastic...

and whether these drives i have owned that have failed are unrecoverable/beyond repair, tampering with the drive is still a warranty issue... and all drives through warranty are buffer stock, the odds of seeing your own drive again are zero.
 
gaspah said:
my ICH8R runs like mud... for raid5 at least...
Click to expand...

I've gotten pretty decent write performance under ICH8DO. I think ICH8R behaves similarly when configured accordingly.

ir5-3vs4-wb-on-vs-off.png
 
pretty impressed with the cached write speeds on that actually..
the read speed is mud still..

but i guess thats pretty good anyways for raid5..

i bet it chews a lot of resources to do that tho...
 
gaspah said:
the read speed is mud still..
Click to expand...

No, it's just fine and close to optimal for the drives used in this configuration. RAID 5 has one drive for redundancy, so optimal STR for a 4-drive array would be 3x STR of a single drive. 200 MB/s / 3 =~ 66.6 MB/s, which is pretty close to the max STR of the drives used in this case (max is around 70 MB/s).

gaspah said:
i bet it chews a lot of resources to do that tho...
Click to expand...

If you can spend the money on an add-on controller with a dedicated processor and cache, then of course you can save some CPU cycles (in addition to getting a better feature set, etc.). But otherwise, for the most part with a modern CPU which you'd use with such a chipset, the additional CPU usage during drive access is a minor/non issue these days; a reasonable alternative for some considering the trade-offs.
 
I've just built a box in the past week using 3x500 gig drives in a RAID 5 on the intel ich9r. I turned on the write caching pretty quickly, and did see nice performance. I'm not too terribly concerned with the overhead since it's on a quad box anyway.

However, I'm thinking about using a 4th drive and switching to RAID 10. The array has already had to rebuild itself 3 times in that week. I've been having some sound driver issues under XP and they've led to bluescreens, or a requirement to hit the reset button...In all cases, the RAID ends up needing to rebuild itself...and it takes about 18 hours or so.

-Kevin
 
KevinG said:
The array has already had to rebuild itself 3 times in that week.
Click to expand...
That's not good. In the five-ish years I've been running RAID5 I don't think I've ever had to rebuild an array, even despite lockups, crashes, hard reboots, power outages, etc. when I had an array in a daily use machine. Three rebuilds in a week would make me extremely weary.
 
Do you have write caching turned on? Are you using onboard, or a 3rd party RAID card?
 
KevinG said:
I'm thinking about using a 4th drive and switching to RAID 10. The array has already had to rebuild itself 3 times in that week. I've been having some sound driver issues under XP and they've led to bluescreens, or a requirement to hit the reset button...In all cases, the RAID ends up needing to rebuild itself...and it takes about 18 hours or so.
Click to expand...

This is one reason for having a separate file server -- so that you can design and maintain a more stable system such that the instability which tends to hit desktops from time to time (not uncommon esp. for gaming / overclocked machines / etc.) doesn't so easily put all your data at risk.
 
If one is to setup raid 5 using dedicated controller like the areca, can you move the whole array with integrity to another system in the future

also will the 4 * 1tb seagate 7200.11 baracuda have problems in a raid 5 array, since the useable size will be greater than 2tb
 
gaspah said:
2. Intel's controller handles RAID 5 fine. I'm using a RAID 5 on an ICH7, so ICH9 should do the trick nicely. If you want a hardware controller, they're expensive.

:rolleyes: ohh really... i originally intended on running raid5 on my ICH8R and it was slow as garbage in raid5... its quite capable of raid0 or raid10 for that matter... but raid5 it supports it, but the write speed is just pathetic
Click to expand...

Raid 5 and 6 arent known for great write speeds, this is common knowledge in the raid world. Raid 6 is great if you need that 2nd drive safety net and i use it on our works storage system for people's documents and such (not back up but a main system for everyone to access their files from)

raid 6 takes a further hit then raid 5, if you want write /read speeds go raid 10 i beleive.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Raid 5 and 6 arent known for great write speeds, this is common knowledge in the raid world. Raid 6 is great if you need that 2nd drive safety net and i use it on our works storage system for people's documents and such (not back up but a main system for everyone to access their files from)

raid 6 takes a further hit then raid 5, if you want write /read speeds go raid 10 i beleive.
Click to expand...
im comparing raid5 on ich8r to raid5 on a hardware controller.. i realise the detriments of raid5..

Madwand said:
No, it's just fine and close to optimal for the drives used in this configuration. RAID 5 has one drive for redundancy, so optimal STR for a 4-drive array would be 3x STR of a single drive. 200 MB/s / 3 =~ 66.6 MB/s, which is pretty close to the max STR of the drives used in this case (max is around 70 MB/s).
Click to expand...

yeah i guess so... everything seems to cap at 200 regardless tho...
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
If one is to setup raid 5 using dedicated controller like the areca, can you move the whole array with integrity to another system in the future

also will the 4 * 1tb seagate 7200.11 baracuda have problems in a raid 5 array, since the useable size will be greater than 2tb
Click to expand...

bump my questions

Once I get all the hardware, I am asumming the hard drives will be automatically formatted for the array. How do I check that each hard drive is working properly in the array? what kind of test should I run ( name and linky please )? What kind of results should I be getting, a ballpark should be good enough?
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
If one is to setup raid 5 using dedicated controller like the areca, can you move the whole array with integrity to another system in the future
Click to expand...

Yes. You can also do this with many on-board/software implementations, provided that you have the similar / same implementation on the new computer. I.e. if you move a RAID array from one ICH9R motherboard to another (which RAID enabled but not defined in the BIOS), it should recognize the array just fine -- install the drivers for the OS, and then the OS will also see the array.

OlIv0rIolI said:
also will the 4 * 1tb seagate 7200.11 baracuda have problems in a raid 5 array, since the useable size will be greater than 2tb
Click to expand...

Yes. Some older RAID implementations don't support > 2 TiB arrays, and even when they do, XP-32 doesn't.

ICH9R does, and it also lets you define two "matrix" arrays, and let you get by the limit in this way -- by splitting the array into two parts, both less than 2 TiB. Other controllers may/many not have similar features. RAID is not a standard, so you have to check the details for the particular implementation.

Windows OS's since 2003 SP1 can have single volumes > 2 TiB via the GPT feature. This includes XP-64, Vista-32 and Vista-64.
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
Once I get all the hardware, I am asumming the hard drives will be automatically formatted for the array. How do I check that each hard drive is working properly in the array?
Click to expand...

No. The array and file systems exist at different levels -- the array implementation typically knows the file system implementation, and conversely the file system implementation doesn't know the RAID implementation, and regards it simply as a drive. Keep this in mind when thinking about the system and maintaining it -- you have to handle both layers separately.

So you define the array, and then partition and format it at the OS level. Similarly, if you expand the array, you have to subsequently expand the partition(s) somehow. Finally, if you move the array to another system, that system has to have a similar-enough OS to recognize the file system once it recognizes the underlying RAID array.

How do you check that the array is working? Again you can do this at two layers -- using the implementation-specific RAID utilities, where available. Status monitoring is provided by default. It's highly recommended that you take advantage of the initial data-free state to play around with failure modes to learn how your implementation deals with disconnected drives, connections out of order, etc. before putting on tons of data you'd have a hard time recovering.

You can also check your array at the file system level using the typical OS tools utilities.
 
Madwand said:
Yes. Some older RAID implementations don't support > 2 TiB arrays, and even when they do, XP-32 doesn't.
Click to expand...

The areca card certainly supports +2TB volumes... it even has a compatibility mode for XP-32... but upgrading to x64 xp/vista is a must anyways.. there is no reason in this day in age to be running a 32-bit OS... unless you have some BS legacy 16-bit database....
 
Madwand said:
It's highly recommended that you take advantage of the initial data-free state to play around with failure modes to learn how your implementation deals with disconnected drives, connections out of order, etc. before putting on tons of data you'd have a hard time recovering.
Click to expand...
YES!! fantastic advice :D
 
arcea is great. we've got one at work for our shared drive, which houses among lots of other things tons of digital video documentation.

the biggest downside to a quality dedicated RAID controller is its price, obviously. but there are some advantages i'm not sure anyone here's mentioned. they'll let you migrate your array to new systems with minimal effort, for example. and the reputable companies usually offer online level/capacity migrations (i was helping our tech guys switch to 1TB drives... okay okay, i forced them to let me watch). anyway that was the only real downtime i've seen on that array in the 2 years i've been there.
 
gaspah said:
The areca card certainly supports +2TB volumes... it even has a compatibility mode for XP-32... but upgrading to x64 xp/vista is a must anyways.. there is no reason in this day in age to be running a 32-bit OS... unless you have some BS legacy 16-bit database....
Click to expand...

I am planning to buy x64vista later. but in the meanwhile I need to know if it will work on my existing system since so many of my applications don't have a 64bit counterpart.

gaspah, you said that it runs in compatibility mode. Now I just need to know if that compatitbility mode in XP 32 does not mean the same array cannot be used in 64bit later on in a separate duel boot os drive. if it is a little confusing, basically it means can I run the same storage array of greater than 2TB in both 32bit and 64bit os from a separate os drive?

I know I am asking alot of questions, but please understand, its a good amount of cash I am going to spend on the setup. Experimenting is always a great idea, but buying something that might not work will not help no matter how much i experiment with it.
 
OlIv0rIolI said:
but in the meanwhile I need to know if it will work on my existing system since so many of my applications don't have a 64bit counterpart.
Click to expand...

XP x64 at least is fully compatible with all your old software.. its only drivers that are incompatible.... but for vista either 32 or 64 you may need to get updated versions of your software...

and yes the +2tb drive will be transferable... but i'd recommend just starting on the 64-bit OS you plan on implimenting as it is much better to run in a native +2TB mode... which you cannot change at a later time unless you wipe your drive...
 
oh and when i went to make the move to x64 I had ALL the same concerns as you... but once I actually made the move.. i found i had ZERO teething problems (that's from XP32 > XP64)... moving to vista i had a couple of small problems this time around (it was a disaster on Vista release day when i installed it the first time but now all those issues are nutted out).

but really upgrading to vista 95% of software issues are fixed by downloading the latest version of the software..
 
oh and if u cant afford vista yet there is a 60day trial which is excellent ;)
 
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