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

[Craig321]

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.

 

[Craig321]

Why not go for the 2x250GB and later buy another 250G and go raid 5?

What does RAID 5 do? Mirror & stripe?

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?

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.

 

[Craig321]

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.