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Raid or not to raid?

G

GMcDougal

Gawd
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Aug 22, 2004
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my western digital died last night (2nd one in 4 years,so i wont be going with them),but i was wondering if i should raid?first of all,im pretty much a gamer.i play alot of games,and listen to mp3s and so on,thats about it. i was looking at buying two of these to raid http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148040, but im unsure if its worth it.alot of people are saying not to do it,but some are saying that i should.if someone can steer me in the right direction,id appreciate it.
 
you saying i will lose all my data with that harddrive i posted in raid,or that raid in general will cause me to lose data?
 
I guess you should specify which RAID you plan on using 0,1,5,10. No real point in RAID0 IMO.. 1,5,10 will all get you redundancy which is good if you value your data.

Do you plan on dedicating ar PC just for storage? Nothing wrong with the HD you posted just need more details on your main goals..

Also do a search on here for RAID, there are many threads that cover which is better for what purpose.
 
Unless your data is extremely important, or you refuse to back up that which is, theres not much point in RAID. Id rather have 400 gigs of space without raid than 200 gigs with security. But maybe thats because ive never had anything die on me except an old maxtor hdd and i back up anything i really need. So in reality, my hard drive space is more like a giant swap space that i just leave everything laying around in. For general home use, if it came down to money...more storage or security, id go storage....but i live on the wild side i guess :p
 
I don't know why all the hating on RAID0 around here. I have been running a SATA Raid0 since last year, and a IDE Raid for 2 years before that. I have never had a problem. Now, I do a lot of large file swapping with video and large images, but I really like it over a stand alone drive.
 
elfletcho said:
I don't know why all the hating on RAID0 around here. I have been running a SATA Raid0 since last year, and a IDE Raid for 2 years before that. I have never had a problem. Now, I do a lot of large file swapping with video and large images, but I really like it over a stand alone drive.
Click to expand...
Warning people about the dangers of RAID0 is not necessarily hating on RAID0. There are certain inherant dangers with a RAID0 setup that this person needs to know before investing time and money in a setup that might not be appropriate for his application.

OP - Read the FAQs and other threads in this forum about RAID storage solutions. You will find all the information you need to know in previously-created threads.
 
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html


Id say its best for you to start to seperate your performance space from your storage space
RAID depending on the level could be applicable to either

there arent that great a number of usage patterns that would see a benefit from RAID0
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1027533679&postcount=27
(performance) but as pointed out, if that last drive had been in a RAID0 the whole array would have been lost with its death, the potential for data loss greatly increases with stripe width (number of drives) in a RAID0
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=874828&highlight=Femme

RAID 0+1 is expensive (efficiency is 50%)

parity arrays (3, 5 ect) make more sense with the greater the number of drives in them (efficiency increases, youd need a minimum of 3 drives) effciency is the number of drives minus one
they are generally great for reads but lag for writes (inless they have a large enough on card buffer\cache to hold a typical write)




as far as drive reliability goes
> http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=BrandMostReliable
> http://www.seagate.com/support/tutorials/handling/handling_tutorial_outline.html



I have 12 Western digitals all past their three year warranty period and still going strong
you have too little information to determine the root cause of failure
 
Ice Czar said:
I have 12 Western digitals all past their three year warranty period and still going strong
you have too little information to determine the root cause of failure
Click to expand...
My company just shipped 2 identical clusters containing 465 nodes each. This included 1540 WD800BB drives, 432 WD1200SD drives, and 48 WD2000JD drives all for the compute nodes. These drives are used as swap space and data storage and have been running at full I/O capacity for the last 30 days. 30 days is not nearly long enough to determine their reliability, but we have only had 3 drives fail so far. This includes initial QC and loading done in our labs.

Just my .02 regarding Western Digital's reliability. Not to mention the WD800BB were the only IDE drives that would give us the I/O performance we needed on all 385 small compute nodes.
 
jonw757 said:
I guess you should specify which RAID you plan on using 0,1,5,10. No real point in RAID0 IMO.. 1,5,10 will all get you redundancy which is good if you value your data.
Click to expand...

If you value your data, you're backing it up. If you're backing it up, what's the difference between RAID0 and RAID1? Or a SLED?

RAID0 can be expected to fail more frequently than a single drive, but that's only a worry for people who are gambling by not doing backups in the first place.

Isn't it?
 
personally it takes me a few days if not more to fully rebuild a machine.. I have no need to increase the probablilty of losing all that time plus all the little things that I may lose like favorites if I havent backed those up in a while.

RAID0 if one drive fails time to rebuild everything again once your new drive comes in, RAID1 if your drive goes down you reboot and your back in business. Thats why I said IMO. I dont see the need for RAID0 in anything I do and the thread starter plays games and listens to music.. no need for a 50% increase in the chance of your computer failing for that. :) Also I personally dont have any experience running RAID1 as an OS drive.
 
jonw757 said:
personally it takes me a few days if not more to fully rebuild a machine.. I have no need to increase the probablilty of losing all that time plus all the little things that I may lose like favorites if I havent backed those up in a while.
Click to expand...

You might want to look into more modern backup strategies. I uase Acronis TrueImage. I use it at home and it works very well. Every week, I make a full image back up. Twice a week I write incremental images. Each of my machines just writes all this over to one of my servers.

I can restore a full image any time I want to. I did it as a test when I first started using it (and happened to have a spare machine), and I recovered the machine completely in about 45 minutes.

The other day, I accidentally overwrote the wrong file when splitting something into two documents in WinWord. I used Acronis to mount the image file; it just appears as a drive letter. I copied the original file back and was on my way in about three minutes.

You run the chance of losing this time and work (and all your settings, and so on) even if you're not using RAID.
 
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