To RAID or not to RAID

I

Ironsoap

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Apr 12, 2007
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I've been doing a lot of research on raid systems over the past week or two, and I'm still undecided as to what config to choose. I'm in the process of building a system at the moment, and it is my first build.

What initially attracted me to RAID was the fact that the OS will recognize it as one drive. Call me OCD, but I always hated it when I saw more than one hard drive recognized on a system (on my current PC, I have a recovery partition that kills me on the inside). So that's what I want, really, a large hard drive that's just recognized as one. Now, I planned on getting two 500 GB drives, equaling a TB before formatting and OS, but I am willing to get more if it means my system will be run well enough.

From what I gather, I don't want RAID 0 because of the rate of failure. I use my computer mostly for work that is sentimental to me, and any data loss is an uh-oh. I also don't want RAID 1 because I want at least 1 TB of space. I have no idea what 2, 3, or 4 do. I'm debating whether or not I should get 5, 10 or 0+1. 5 will up the cost of the drives by one drive, but I can handle that, but supposedly it suffers in the write area. 10 and 1+0 will have the performance specs I want, but the cost I hear is ungodly.

I'm sorry if I sound like a total noobatron, but any personal experience or wisdom would be helpful.

(P.S. If anybody needs it, here is the newegg wishlist for the build.)
 
My advice would be to drop the thought of a Raid system and just have 2 drives. But if you insist, you will need 3 drives in a Raid 5 configuration to get the 1TB of space that you need. You will also need an extra drive as a spare so if one of the drives goes bad you will be able to rebuild it quickly because this will be your OS drive also. Another draw back is that your OS will boot up slower because it is a Raid system.
 
might i suggest JBOD? no RAID, but everything looks like one big disk (and you don't lose any disk capacity to that silly redundancy crap).
 
iroc409 said:
might i suggest JBOD? no RAID, but everything looks like one big disk (and you don't lose any disk capacity to that silly redundancy crap).
Click to expand...

This is quite interesting...but I can't seem to find a decent mobo with JBOD support...can you recommend me one?
 
not off the top of my head, but many inexpensive add-on devices support it.

perhaps the silicon image secondary sata controller on intel boards like the d975xbx will do it?
 
here is what i have and would recommend..

get a 2 sata 60gb drives RAID 1......... or just use 1 drive

then use you 2 500gb drives in a JBOD or spanning mode in Windows

and instead of having them be a separate drive have then be a dynamic drive that is a folder ie. "My Media" inside the 60gb OS drive


looks like this

C: (2x 60gb RAID1)
My DOcuments
My Media (2x500 JBOD)

then your OS wont load slower and your be running the OS and you documents will be protected from single drive failure (raid 1)

and you still get your 1TB storage for videos music and other things

and you only have 1 drive in My Computer

this might not be the best scenario but it is one that fits what you ask for
 
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