Raid or not?

[Stupid_Newbie]

Well I just ordered a new PC, its in the mail. My old rig (see sig) has been sitting in a corner for a while, so im completely out of the loop.

I wanted a 2-3TB drive, with good performance, and fairly quiet. I was recommended the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7000.D. So I got a few of them to keep my storage at 2TB. I also have a 120GB M4 for some snappy OS performance. I guess im wondering if the drives themselves, will perform quiet well as two seperate drives, or can I raid them so that they act as a single 2TB drive, and have better performance?

I also have a 1TB USB drive for my sons movies (to stream to his TV), and a 3TB backup Mybook Live (will be for my movies to stream etc).

So what do the storage gurus recommend. Im sure the performance of the drives alone will be much better then anything I have owned (last rig, HDX18 laptop, and current Latitude D630). Would it be worth the data loss risk to raid them? Performance that much better on the mechanical drives?

 

[Dangman]

I guess im wondering if the drives themselves, will perform quiet well as two seperate drives, or can I raid them so that they act as a single 2TB drive, and have better performance?

It seems like you're asking two seperate questions there:
1) Regardless of whether or not you RAID 0 those drives, the noise level will be the same
2) You can RAID 0 those drives if you like if your data isn't important or it's been backed up.

Would it be worth the data loss risk to raid them?

Thats something we can't tell you because its YOUR data. So you should be asking yourself that: Is my data that important to me?

If you already have a backup of the data and/or the data is easily replaceable or non-essential, then RAID 0 those drives. If you don't have a backup, the data is valuable, and the data is hard to replace or find again, then don't RAID 0 those drives and have a copy of the important data on each drive.

 

[Stupid_Newbie]

Just wondering if the performance gains are worth it. And how often a raid 0 would fail.

I didnt mean quiet, quite well i guess lol. Im an electrician.

 

[Dangman]

Just wondering if the performance gains are worth it.

Lemme post what I said earlier again:

If you already have a backup of the data and/or the data is easily replaceable or non-essential, then RAID 0 those drives. If you don't have a backup, the data is valuable, and the data is hard to replace or find again, then don't RAID 0 those drives and have a copy of the important data on each drive.

It doesn't matter how fast the drives are. What matters is how valuable the data is. Get it?

And how often a raid 0 would fail.

Often enough that you should keep a backup of any valuable data but not often enough to completely rule it out as an option if you want sheer performance.

 

[Abula]

Raid 0 is bound to fail sooner or later, from 4 raid 0 arrays i have done in different computers all have failed, some took a month to fail other a couple of years, but to me its not worth it. If you want speed go with ssd, if you want storage go with low powered hdds (hitachi 5k3000 and Samsung F4EG are good options), if you want to have some parity there are lots of options out there, just keep reading this forum section, and you will be surprised into how many options you can do, but careful, i started low, and now im speding above $2k on my sever =P, but for sure is something im enjoying.