what is the best raid solution

S

shaden79

n00b
Joined
Apr 15, 2008
Messages
50
ok so i am planning on making a new nahalem build when it comes out in November and i was wondering what the best storage slash raid solution would be. my current pc consists of a wd 640 and a 3 3+ year old 120's. 2 of the 120's are in a raid 1 config but they now don't really hold anything other then my old xp boot drive which i haven't used in over a year. i have never had a drive fail on me but the prospect of such an occurrence has kept me away from a raid 0 array so far. simply put what drives should i get and what is the best raid solution for both speed and reliability. my new case will most likely have space for 6 drives.

thanks in advance,

Shaden79
 
Well, RAID 0 would fit the "speed" category, but not "reliability", RAID 1 would just be essentially the same as a single drive in terms of performance, so you'll probably want to look towards RAID 10 (requires four drives minimum) or RAID 5 (three drives minimum and recommended to be used with a quality hardware RAID controller for best performance and minimal overhead).

For your uses, I would just stick with single drives, like a WD6400AAKS (still plenty fast) or consider a 10,000 RPM Velociraptor for the fast random access times and sequential read/writes that are so important for load times.
 
shaden79 said:
ok so i am planning on making a new nahalem build when it comes out in November and i was wondering what the best storage slash raid solution would be. my current pc consists of a wd 640 and a 3 3+ year old 120's. 2 of the 120's are in a raid 1 config but they now don't really hold anything other then my old xp boot drive which i haven't used in over a year. i have never had a drive fail on me but the prospect of such an occurrence has kept me away from a raid 0 array so far. simply put what drives should i get and what is the best raid solution for both speed and reliability. my new case will most likely have space for 6 drives.

thanks in advance,

Shaden79
Click to expand...

A little more info would help us give you better suggestions.

What do you do with your computer? How important is the data to you? Do you have any price points you are trying to hit? How much data do you want to keep online?

I recommend keeping it simple. Either get a single large drive, setup a boot partition of 100 gig or so, and store your data on a second partition taking up the rest of the drive.

If performance is more of an issue, then a Velociraptor is the way to go.

I would pick up an external USB drive to make a copy of your important data though. Any hard drive can fail at any time with no warning.

Don
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top