6tb + ssd boot overkill for general use?

powelly

powelly

powelly

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3 Aug 2010
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at the moment i already have something similar to this as a boot drive
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-120-WD
and i 1tb samsung f3? as a storage drive. i was thinking to soon get a cheapish ssd for a bootdrive, but then i seen these http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-097-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1955 and was thinking that it would be a good idea to buy another wd blue 500gb and raid0 it with my existing one and the buy 2 of the above 2tb's and raid0 them?

i download a lot of films, games, music ect. my 1tb drive is quite recent and im down to about 600gb allready :( seeming as this will only cost me about £220, does this seem a sound investment or complete overkill?
 
I go by the rule of, if your going to use it, then no, it's not overkill :p

Yes, it's rather more than the average user would need, but if (like me) your a hoarder, and never delete anything, then every little bit of space counts.

I would never RAID0 storage drives though, with them being storage, you don't need the extra speed, but if one drive fails, you loose twice as much data. But I would say your probably better getting a single 2TB drive now, and if you fill it, get another later, they're a lot more likely to come down in price, than they are to go up, and if they do go up, it won't be by a lot, but you might end up not filling the new drive for another year.
 
RAID0 two 2TB drives = 4TB of "films, games, music etc."

One drive fails = 4TB of "films, games, music etc." lost forever.

Good idea?

No, not unless you can back up 4TB of data.
 
if your going to raid storage disks, it should be Raid1.

my setup maybe abit overkill for some
i have an SSD for OS/Visual Studio
Hybrid drive for Games/Steam
Velociraptor for storage
and F3 ecogreen for backup


any large amounts of storage i tend to dump on my server which has 12TB
 
i have an esata lian li external hdd with 4.5tb in it (3 x 1.5tb) it can be set up in raid etc etc but i have it as just a bunch of disks(JBOD) so that if one drive fails i still have the info on the other 2...beauty is though it shows as a single 4.5tb drive.....and because its esata its as fast as having them in the machine....i also have 2 x 2tb in the machine itself and important stuff is copied on to both obviously. 8.5tb of storage + ssd :)
 
Yeh thats what I do at the moment in my HTPC / storage server. SSD for boot & raid 1 the storage drives. Once the storage drives are full & you wont be writing any more data to it you can take the second drive out (mirror of the 1st) and store it away to free up sata connections / drive bays.
 
The direction I went was to have an SSD + medium Mechanical drive in my gaming PC, and then have a separate NAS machine for my bulk storage. It's running in RAID5 which is enough to give some protection.
 
My current setup:
2 x 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E's (Raid 0) - WinXP (64 bit)
4 x 2TB Samsung F4's (Raid 0) - Storage

And when available (and cash permits):
2 x 120GB OCZ Vertex 3's (Raid 0) - Win7 (64 bit)
 
powelly2010 said:
nice, think i will go for a raid 1 setup on 2 2tb's then? and an ssd?
Click to expand...

Zarf said:
It's running in RAID5 which is enough to give some protection.
Click to expand...

Be aware tha RAID is not a substitue for a regular verified backup.

loudbob said:
My current setup:
2 x 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E's (Raid 0) - WinXP (64 bit)
4 x 2TB Samsung F4's (Raid 0) - Storage
Click to expand...

Either you have a very good backup solution for that 4TB or you really don't value your data!

Bet it's fast though! :D
 
LordSplodge said:
Be aware tha RAID is not a substitue for a regular verified backup.



Either you have a very good backup solution for that 4TB or you really don't value your data!

Bet it's fast though! :D
Click to expand...

Yup, t'is fast (8TB tho', not 4) and all the important stuff is backed up on a weekly basis :D
 
Cycrow said:
if your going to raid storage disks, it should be Raid1.
Click to expand...

Raid 1 is quite wasteful of drive space, based on what the OP is saying , I'd suggest he look into RAID5. If you had 4 x 1Tb in RAID 5 you'd have 3Tb of available storage and if any one of those 1Tb drives failed you wouldn't lose anything.

Scale that up to 2 Tb drives and with 4 you've got 6Tb of storage and reasonable fault tolerance.

I run a home server which currently has 4 x 1Tb drives in RAID5 on a 3ware controller, thats shortly being upgraded to include an extra 4 x1Tb drives. So I'll have approximately 7 Tb of available storage. Although theoretically I should probably set one of the new drives as a hot spare, so I'd have 6Tb bare storage and if any one failed not only would i not lose a thing, the hot spare would kick in on a drive failure and rebuid the array automatically so that it would still be fault tolerant even with a failed drive.

For large data storage RAID0 is only any good if you're happy to lose all the data (my desktop is RAID0 but then everythings backed up to my RAID5 server).

E-I
 
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