to RAID or not to...

[Furious911]

Hey fellas I got my hands on 2 250gig 7200rpm SATA HDs from Hitachi the Deskstar model. (We updated a Server and 14 of these were going in the trash!) I have an EVGA 680i SLI board and it has RAID capabilities but I know nothing about RAID.

In you experiences is it even worth it? I don't work from home or have really important stuff on my computer, this will be a gaming/multimedia build I'm doing probably using Vista. I'm wondering if its better to do a RAID where i guess it mirrors itself *and I hear is slower) or just have 500gig along with a little 80gig I already have.

Comments and suggestions would rock. (PS this system isn't built yet, that happens on Friday)

Thanks fellas.

 

[Verge]

Well you can mirror them and have redundancy... but you might not care about that

Or you can stripe them and get performance... but if 1 drive fails, you have to reload everything... take your pick

 

[Concentric]

Perhaps use one as a storage drive with the other as an external backup, or RAID-0 them as an OS drive with the 80gig for data or a backup of the data if you keep it on the array.

In any case, if you only have an 80gig at the moment (PATA even?) you should definately consider using the 250s (or some newer drives) for the OS instead
Even if you don't use very much HDD space, larger and newer drives provide better performance - look at some benchmarks.

 

[skatiN64]

I'd go with raid 0 or no raid. Either would be a decent performance boost from what you have now. raid 0 for a little more speed
no raid if you want to back files up on the other hdd.

 

[bigdogchris]

For gaming, raid 0 gives a slight boost but raid 0 is mostly usefull for pulling large files.

I guess if it's free you could but i would raid 0+1.

 

[Furious911]

Sp striping means that it the OS sees both HDs but makes it seem like they are 1 large one? This increases perfornace? The 80gig is a SATA also, I was thinking of using it to store files that are "important" wedding pics etc, which I wotn access all that often. The 80gig happens to be a Deskstar too. I think they are all 1.5 speed as opposed to 3gb will this really affect much of anything? Im just used to a regular old IDE hard drive atm.

 

[MrGuvernment]

think of raid 0 as using the speed of both drives as 1 drive....


if you have important files, do a raid 1, it gives some security for you (assumiong you also back up your pics to something else)

 

[MrGuvernment]

think of raid 0 as using the speed of both drives as 1 drive....

if you have important files, do a raid 1, it gives some security for you (assumiong you also back up your pics to something else)

 

[DonDon]

Raid 1 will provide some data security in case of drive failure, but does not help for data corruption by virus, power glitch, or accidental deletion. It is not a replacement for a separate backup of the files stored on the array. But if you are not that concerned about the data on this system, don't waste your time.

Raid 0 will improve (almost double in most cases) the read and write throughput of the drives, but will not improve the access time. If any of the drives in a Raid 0 die, the entire array is gone. It also increases the boot time as the Raid bios must start and initialize the array before it can start to boot. In real life terms, it will provide a modest performance increase. Since you have the drives for free anyway, I would go ahead and Raid 0 them.

As far as the 80 gig drives goes, if the files on there are important, you should have at least 2 independent copies of them. I personally use 2 external drives to backup my photos and music off of my NAS box. I alternate the backups so I keep 3 copies of most things, and at least 2 copies of the newest stuff. I have worked with computer databases off and on for the last 20 years and have seen many backups (mostly tape based) fail.

Don