2x 250 Gb Western Digital WD2500AAKS RAID 0 or 1x 500 Gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS?

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

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Hi,

I'm trying to decide between these hard drive setups:

2 x 250 Gb Western Digital WD2500AAKS in RAID 0
1 x 500 Gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS no RAID

There's no real loss for me with either apart from about £12.

If I go for the RAID I'd then get a 500GB single after I've bought the PC for a mirror backup.

If I went for the single 500GB I'd do the same as above: get another 500GB for a manual/scheduled mirror backup.

Thanks,
Craig.
 
I was in a similar situation, was going to get 2*160Gb to run raid 0 for OS & games and an additional 320Gb for other data. Ended up getting 2 WD 3200KS from clearance instead, because it's a lot cheaper and also I'm not so sure if Ghost will reconise the RAID array which will make windows re-install a pain in the backside.
 
it all depends on what you are planning to use it for. Its ok to stripe for performance but what happens if its fails. Where are you storing your data? is this on another drive? what is your backup schedule?

I would not use stripe for storage, the only time i would use stripe is on an os drive and i have atleast monthly backups. Even so a 500GB os drive striped is a bit OTT. Why not go for the 2x250GB and later buy another 250G and go raid 5?
 
Euphoria said:
Why not go for the 2x250GB and later buy another 250G and go raid 5?
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What does RAID 5 do? Mirror & stripe?

Euphoria said:
it all depends on what you are planning to use it for. Its ok to stripe for performance but what happens if its fails. Where are you storing your data? is this on another drive? what is your backup schedule?
Click to expand...

My plan to start out with is to manually backup my data using the windows backup tool or SyncToy, I'll store the backups on my external hard drive.

Then when I get a bit more money in I'll get either another 2 250gb in RAID 0 or a single 500gb for a complete mirror of my main RAID 0 setup, the mirror would be scheduled every few days/weeks using something like Acronis TrueImage.

There's no real loss if I go for RAID 0 (it'll cost me about £12 extra in hard drives) and it'll give me that extra speed as well.

The only thing I'm wary of is the fact that the data is split evenly between each drive, so they rely on each other, but I guess I'd have backups in case anything went wrong.

I really don't know if to go for RAID 0 or not :(

Craig.
 
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AFAIK Raid 5 is similar to Raid 0 but with 1 extra drive for distributed parity, so you don't loose all your data when 1 of the drives fail as all data can be calculated with the parity drive. According to wiki :)
 
hmm i just found a review that stated the "Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000AAKS SATA-II 16MB Cache" can't compete with the "Samsung SpinPoint T HD501LJ 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache"

Now i'm really getting miffed. I can't make a decision. I can't make my mind up between 2x320 1X500 WD, seagate or samsung now lol
 
XysteR said:
....but raid 5 is far more CPU hungry than raid 0 because of this extra data handling?
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depends on your raid controller and if its true hardware or fake. Also other things such as what other devices, cards you have connected and what you plan to run on it.

I recently moved from raid 5 to raid 10 and i wouldnt say there is not that much cpu hogging. But then again in this day and age most of us have core 2 or dual core chips.
 
XysteR said:
....but raid 5 is far more CPU hungry than raid 0 because of this extra data handling?
Click to expand...
Yes, unless you've got a decent RAID card (ie are willing to spend £300+) then you'll see the write speed bottlenecked. An accelerated software card like a Highpoint RocketRaid will give you about 60-70Mb/s whereas a plain onboard controller from Intel or NVidia will struggle to crack 20Mb/s.
 
I just wondered about the failure issues with RAID 0...

I know the failure rate is increased as you use 2 hard drives which have to work together, but is the chance of data loss increased if you were to loose power?

Thanks,
Craig.
 
rpstewart said:
Yes, unless you've got a decent RAID card (ie are willing to spend £300+) then you'll see the write speed bottlenecked. An accelerated software card like a Highpoint RocketRaid will give you about 60-70Mb/s whereas a plain onboard controller from Intel or NVidia will struggle to crack 20Mb/s.
Click to expand...

ORLY?:p
 
HDTach only shows read speed which for RAID5 only requires XOR support when a drive has failed. It's the write speed which will be poor without a decent card.
 
My gigabyte mobo has both the ICH9R controller and gigabytes sata controller. I've heard good things about the ICH9R controller. If i was gonna buy a better SATA2 raid controller what would i be looking for?
 
Craig321 said:
I just wondered about the failure issues with RAID 0...

I know the failure rate is increased as you use 2 hard drives which have to work together, but is the chance of data loss increased if you were to loose power?

Thanks,
Craig.
Click to expand...
Data loss from losing power is largely an OS issue as it depends on how it decides to do its writes (lazy, etc).

The ICHxR onchip controllers, as good as they are, won't touch a dedicated card with its own memory, etc. Unfortunately RAID cards are pretty expensive and I'd say only really worth considering if you have lots of drives, have a business need for sustained high performance (i.e. not loading a BF2 map a couple of seconds quicker), or are running something other than RAID 0 or 1.
 
I'll stick with the intel then, Just about to stick in 2 X 320 in raid0 and 1 500 as a second drive as it were.
 
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