Any point in RAIDing?

Ease

Ease

Ease

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I've owned a computer for as long as I can remember; I even had a Commodore 64 before I could talk :p And I've never once had a hard drive fail on me. Is the speed boost from RAID really worth the effort? And, how often do hard drives actually fail? I have a few pounds spare, and want to move my 500GB of movies/music from my external hard drive to an internal hard drive as my external is a bit loud, and obviously a bit slow (as it's connected by USB) - should I bother getting two smaller hard drives for RAID or just the one larger one?

Also, quietness is a pretty big issue for me, but heat is not, so if you could recommend any drives in relation to that that'd be cool. Thanks for spending the time reading my post!
 
commodore 64 eh? i was a sinclaire spectrum bloke myself, kind of miss the old retro gaming every now and then all those pretty technicolour lights that the screen would display while a game loads, the sound that sounded like an old 68K fax modem.

As for you're answer, i would say that raid is'nt worth it, personally though some will disagree with me. The one thing that is worth it, rather than the speed, is the ability to join the two drives together into one single drive but both drives have to be the same size or the raid will go on the least sizable hard disk so for example if you have a 32Gb and a 64GB hdd, then when they are raided it will be one single 64GB drive rather than a 96GB drive and its worth mentioning that if one of those disks fails then you will loose all of you're data. As for the speed i am unsure. Probably one of the best Raids is the raid mirror but from what i understand you need a minimum of 3 hard disks for that.
 
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If it's just for storage, where would the benefit be from having a RAID setup? Do you need the extra performance? IMHO there's no point in RAID0 for storage.
 
Thanks for the quick reply myth!

I just thought I'd add another quick little question before I go to bed. My motherboard quotes, under "Storage Interface" -

"South Bridge:
6x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2_0, SATA2_1, SATA2_2, SATA2_3, SATA2_4, SATA2_5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10

GIGABYTE SATA2 chip:
1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices
2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATA2_0, GSATA2_1) supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD "

What's the difference between the two "GSATA" connectors and the six "SATA" connectors?
 
Ease said:
I've owned a computer for as long as I can remember; I even had a Commodore 64 before I could talk :p And I've never once had a hard drive fail on me. Is the speed boost from RAID really worth the effort? And, how often do hard drives actually fail? I have a few pounds spare, and want to move my 500GB of movies/music from my external hard drive to an internal hard drive as my external is a bit loud, and obviously a bit slow (as it's connected by USB) - should I bother getting two smaller hard drives for RAID or just the one larger one?

Also, quietness is a pretty big issue for me, but heat is not, so if you could recommend any drives in relation to that that'd be cool. Thanks for spending the time reading my post!
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The chance of failure isn't increased because it's RAID, it's increased because the array relies on both the drives to work. If one drive breaks all the data is lost and unrecoverable due to everything being split between the two drives.

So, in short, you double the chance of failure.

I say RAID it definitely worth the speed increase, but personally I wouldn't go for RAID0 on storage drives, there's really no point. Everything I want from my storage drive (movies, music, documents) load instantly anyway.

On a storage drive the copying speeds would obviously be increased using RAID 0, but as a single drive these days gives ~120MB/s (based on the speeds of my 1.5TB drive) I really don't see the need for RAID on a storage drive (for me anyway).

I do however have RAID on my operating system drive, and noticed a good increased in speed (16K stripe). I never, ever keep anything important on the array though.

Ease said:
What's the difference between the two "GSATA" connectors and the six "SATA" connectors?
Click to expand...

Not much, they're just on different SATA controllers. The six would be on the Intel controller (e.g. ICH10R) and the extra 2 would be on the Gigabyte controller.
 
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I've installed 3 Raid systems in the last 4 years and non have them have failed so far. As mentioned above, you have to view the array as one drive. Because if one part fails using Raid0 you lose everything. But the benefits are defenitely there to be had especially on SSD's which you see huge gains with a decent controller card.

Even if you want to protect your data, certain raid modes can be a good thing, as some mirror your data and theres modes where you can use 1 drive for redundancy etc. I've never used RAID that way, but its commonly used in servers that way.
 
i had raid setup on an asus P5Q3 motherboard and it, somehow (dont ask me how) managed to loose my raid configuration. Subsequently i lost all of my data on them and had to start from scratch. For that reason, i don't trust raid 0, you're best bet would probably be raid 1 or raid 10 (raid 1+0), their is one raid that's supposed to provide better speeds than raid 0 but i can't remember which raid that is (think it might be raid 5 or 6) but if you have 3 hard disks or so i'd go for raid 1 or raid 10, atleast that way some of you're data will be protected against system failure. Quick question though, i read that their was a raid 53, apparently a combination of raid 5 and raid 3, whats raid 3? cos i've not seen that mentioned before.
 
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Ease said:
I thought some of the RAIDs were to reduce the chance of losing everything?
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if you just want to make sure you dont lose everything, why dont you just implement a good backup routine ?

a larger internal drive to store all your data and and external HD that you copy to or a NAS box ? bear in mind that if its music and films you dont need to copy to it that often...
 
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As others have said, don't bother with RAID0 for storage drives, a single 1TB WD/Seagate/Samsung/Hitachi will be a better and safer buy in all likliness. It may be worthwhile utilizing RAID1 for safety (as it copies all the files onto both disks) but you lose a drive's capacity.

As far as main hard drive is concerned, RAID0'ing my 2 seagate 7200.10s has squeezed an awful lot of life out of them. They perform much better together and are nearly as fast as the 1TB drive I use as storage, whilst before they were much slower. It's worth buying two smaller hard drives such as WD Black 320s/640s and RAIDing them as a boot drive, definately. Of course it "doubles" the failure chances so that is a risk to consider.
 
also remember raid1 does not cover you if your computer gets stolen.. you lose both drives with your data on it
 
As said - RAID doesn't equal backing up, it is there to either increase the uptime or speed.

For home users Mirroring isn't that usefull as such, but for a business it is. For example you have an exchange server, if you don't mirror the OS drive or page file drive and one fails then the whole server will go down.

RAID 5 is a good one for file server storage because you have say 3 drives, if you lose 1 the data will still be accessible.

Same for RAID 1+0, it gives speed increases and offers redundancy.

For home use RAID 0 has it's place but often it's an ego thing (in my opinion)
 
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