I just ordered all of my parts and before they get here, I have a couple of RAID questions.
I got two Western Digital caviar black 640s. Now that I'm a little more up to date on RAID functionality, other than yeah you get a speed increase while transferring large files in RAID 0, I'd like to ask a couple more questions:
My MB only supports RAID 0,1, and 5. So those are my choices w/o buying a dedicated RAID controller.
Some of this may be incorrect, so please add in what is wrong.
RAID 0: Moron RAID. This was what I was initially going to use.
RAID 1: SMART RAID. Mirrored but with no performance over a single drive, and loss of 50% total capacity.
RAID 5: Better performance than Mirrored RAID 1, same level of redundancy (being one drive fail), but technologically complicated and minimum disks is 3. Loss of 1 disk capacity.
Questions:
1. If I load my system using RAID 0, and I cahnge the RAID configuration to RAID 1 or 5 later w/o reloading?
2. If I need to reload to change configurations, can I use Acronis Image to do that?
3. What is the performance trade off between RAID 0 and RAID 5?
If the RAID 5 performance hit is small, I may just get another Black 640 and use RAID 5. It's a good thing they are only 80 bucks right now.
Thanks a lot again for everyone's help.
I got two Western Digital caviar black 640s. Now that I'm a little more up to date on RAID functionality, other than yeah you get a speed increase while transferring large files in RAID 0, I'd like to ask a couple more questions:
My MB only supports RAID 0,1, and 5. So those are my choices w/o buying a dedicated RAID controller.
Some of this may be incorrect, so please add in what is wrong.
RAID 0: Moron RAID. This was what I was initially going to use.
RAID 1: SMART RAID. Mirrored but with no performance over a single drive, and loss of 50% total capacity.
RAID 5: Better performance than Mirrored RAID 1, same level of redundancy (being one drive fail), but technologically complicated and minimum disks is 3. Loss of 1 disk capacity.
Questions:
1. If I load my system using RAID 0, and I cahnge the RAID configuration to RAID 1 or 5 later w/o reloading?
2. If I need to reload to change configurations, can I use Acronis Image to do that?
3. What is the performance trade off between RAID 0 and RAID 5?
If the RAID 5 performance hit is small, I may just get another Black 640 and use RAID 5. It's a good thing they are only 80 bucks right now.
Thanks a lot again for everyone's help.