What do you guys use your RAID 5 array for....

D

Dark Prodigy

Jawbreaker
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Mar 10, 2006
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Finally got around to doing some small upgrades to my aging workstation and for pure amusement I wanted to add a RAID 5 array with some left over hard drives I had lying around from some previous builds.

I set up to 2 300Gb Velociraptors RAID 0 for my OS with my Supermicro onboard RAID. Was a pain with the new Windows 7 Professional x64 (because my board uses the old nForce4 chipsets in which Win 7 has NO DRIVERS for) but finally found a solution and it works great.

I had 4 150Gb RaptorX drives, 2 of which are recertified, collecting dust.

So I said fuck it and bought a simple RAID controller card - HighPointe RocketRAID 2310- off eBay for about $40... seemed like a good deal compared to a new one... also didn't want to spent $300+ on a true hardware raid card when I wasn't even sure it would work properly. To make a long story short, I then installed the card and drives and set up a RAID 5 array with the 4 RaptorX HDD's. Never set up a RAID 5 before.

I must have set it up properly because the disc management software in Win 7 saw the array as 1 drive with the appropriate size allocation - around 427Gb. I formatted the new drive array and named it RaptorRAID...and it shows up perfectly next to my C: drive of RAID 0 Velociraptors.

I took a 4Gb movie file from a USB thumb drive and transfered to my RAID 0 array... was doing about 21Mbps..took about 8 minutes. I then transferred that same file to my Raptor RAID 5 array from my RAID 0 array... I was astonished that it took less than 50 seconds at a speed of 213Mbps dipping slightly to 202 a couple of times... I thought RAID 5 was supposed to be slow...! Even though tranferring it back to the RAID 0 array was slightly faster at around 235Mbps.

Satisified, I then said "now what?". I have a somewhat speedy RAID 5 storage array and don't know what to do with it. Backups? Apps? Torrents?
The HighPointe WebGUI lets me log directly into the array remotely, but I really don't have a need. I also have a 2Gb RAID 1 NAS enclosure that I use to backup data..it can be a little slow though....


So after all that..what do YOU guys use your RAID 5 array for?
 
First post... Woo!

I thought raid 5 was the best of both worlds, speed and redundancy so I'd expect a decent speed but that's a huge difference? Maybe it haas something to do with the raid card?
 
raid 5 can definitely be fast..

but i am missing something.... why RAID 0 on OS and RAID 5 for storage?

wouldnt you want RAID 1 for OS, so the rig can survive a dive failure?

RAID 0 with SSDs...... okay, with spinning disks you have 2 times great of a risk of losing your data than if it was just on a single disk....



and to answer the question in the title.... i used mine (when i had it) to store movies with the ability to have uptime with 1 drive failure.
 
Adidas4275 said:
raid 5 can definitely be fast..

but i am missing something.... why RAID 0 on OS and RAID 5 for storage?

wouldnt you want RAID 1 for OS, so the rig can survive a dive failure?

RAID 0 with SSDs...... okay, with spinning disks you have 2 times great of a risk of losing your data than if it was just on a single disk....



and to answer the question in the title.... i used mine (when i had it) to store movies with the ability to have uptime with 1 drive failure.
Click to expand...



RAID 0 desktop because....just for the hell of it and its pretty quick with Velociraptors. No SSD's yet for me because the tech needs to mature IMO. Too many "my SSD's were fast... at first... now 4 months later they are crawling like normal hard drives..." reports for me. No "maintenance" needed for mechanical drives besides a defrag or two. 200mbps transfer on install... 200 mbps transfers 3 years from now.

Besides... I setup automatic imaging backups once a week. If a drive fails, I'll just restore it from an image backup.. no big deal.

Why did you get rid of your RAID 5 array?
 
Could we see benchmarks in the form of AS SSD or CrystalDiskMark?

Then you should also be able to see that random writing on RAID5 is very slow. So RAID5 is good for sequential workloads; like backups; mass-storage basically. Most windows RAID5s are also not as reliable as their "one disk failure" redundancy level implies. Many people use RAID5 on windows without having a backup of that data; effectively doing a Russian Roulette on your data.

As long as you got backups sorted out, just experiment away with RAID5. Or simply use RAID0 and regard all data on the RAID as able to fail; with a backup protecting that. If you think your data is safe by just the RAID5, you might run into a surprise one day.
 
When my main rig was functioning I had a 4TB LVM pool made up of 4 RAID 5 arrays. I used it for storing movies, music and images. It was all made up using PCI SATA cards, so read/write speeds were abysmal, but that wasn't an issue for me.
 
i ditched RAID 5 because i got pissed at my RR card beeping every time i installed a new drive in my WHS will it was running.... and not just one beep but the damn missing drive beep...

and i just went with duplication and backups on my WHS
 
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