To RAID or not to RAID

  • Thread starter Deleted member 278999
  • Start date
D

Deleted member 278999

Guest
Right now in 'the desktop' I've got an 250gb 840 EVO, 2x 512 850 EVO's and a 1TB WD Black.

Currently all of these drives operate independently. The 840 EVO is taking a dump, has a couple of SMART errors and I'm working on getting an RMA. There really is no valuable data on this machine. Everything is backed up.

My thinking so far has been keep the drives separate to avoid any que depth issues. Not that this is generally a problem. But there are some instances where say a game is installing and a query is being run and games are being played. But mostly to keep the OS separate.

I'm not so much worried about raw numbers. Latency is more important. Is RAID 0, 5 or 10 even worth it these days? Or is RAID 0 and a mirror of that image the best implementation? Hardware vs Software RAID? Or is the current setup the best to give the best 'feel'?
 
First off Raid 0 is for performance gain only.
All other forms of Raid is for fault tolerance and don't let anyone tell you it's a form of backup. Fault tolerance and backup are very different. Fault tolerance is all about up time and avoiding downtime in the event of hardware failure. Backup is all about total loss (house fire for instance) or virus/software issue or user error and want to roll back to a previous copy.

So the real question is what is your reason for raid? fault tolerance or performance?

I will assume performance - Raid 0

With raid 0, your volume size is limited by the smallest capacity drive multiplied by the number of disks. So your two 512 850 EVOs would be perfect because they are same size.

I have experience with both software and hardware raid 0 - you will see a performance increase in both instances, but more reliability and even better performance long term with hardware raid.

As for mirroring that raid 0 - you could create a partition on the 1TB equaling the raid 0 and set it up raid 1 which would be raid 10. I wouldn't bother though because there will be a performance hit and it would easier to setup an OS backup at night that saves to the 1TB instead.

I have not noticed latency in raid 0. other forms of raid there will be latency.
 
I would recommend the following setup:

Use a 512GB SSD for your OS drive. Then setup your remaining SSD and HDD in a Simple storage pool with Windows Storage Spaces.
Storage spaces can be expanded / drives swapped out / modified to the Nth degree. It does not insist that all drives be the same model / size.
Windows does some pretty slick memory / SSD caching within Storage Spaces. It also lets you keep a D: drive for storage / games instead of having a million different letter drives.


I'm running that style of setup both at work and home, and it works wonderfully. Please note: I do keep backups of everything, so if a drive dies I'm not going to lose anything.
 
Last edited:
iamwhoiamtoday said:
I would recommend the following setup:

Use a 512GB SSD for your OS drive. Then setup your remaining SSD and HDD in a Simple storage pool with Windows Storage Spaces.
Storage spaces can be expanded / drives swapped out / modified to the Nth degree. It does not insist that all drives be the same model / size.
Windows does some pretty slick memory / SSD caching within Storage Spaces. It also lets you keep a D: drive for storage / games instead of having a million different letter drives.


I'm running that style of setup both at work and home, and it works wonderfully. Please note: I do keep backups of everything, so if a drive dies I'm not going to lost anything.
Click to expand...

Will have to check out storage spaces - thanks!
 
Try Drivepool instead of Storage Spaces. A Much better program. And worth the very small fee...
 
I will give this a try! Thank you all for the advice and information

I'm going to give Raid 0 a go with daily incremental backups for the array, and on the fly backups for the important stuff.

Regarding que depth, when does this become an issue? Is there a benefit to putting the OS on a separate drive so that it never needs to wait?

Thanks again!
 
Repeating what drescherjm said, if latency (aka low queue depth performance) is what you're after, then don't RAID. Using RAID 0 to improve performance in low queue depth scenarios only worked on spinner hard drives, and does not work for SSDs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top