Best RAID for gaming PC

[Haggisman]

Work are currently chucking a load of kit, and I'm looking at grabbing some of the decent bits to build a gaming system.

Need a bit of advice on drives - the system I've claimed getting comes with:

1x Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB 2.5" SATA-II SSD
1x Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 32MB Cache

Also up for grabs are:

2x identical WD drives
4x 2TB HITACHI Ultrastar 0F10452 2.0TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200 RPM 32MB Buffer
A load of other 1TB drives of various brands

The WD drives have been in PCs which have been used as vSphere hosts - on 24/7 - for the last 6 months, sat on a shelf for ~3 months before that, and daily desktop use for ~3 months before that.

The Hitachi drives have been in a Netgear readyNas on 24/7 for the last 3 years at least.

The other 1TB drives I'm not sure about the history of, but most will have been in servers 24/7 for the last 3 years at least.

I'm looking for redundancy, but preferably not at the cost of performance. 1TB should be plenty of storage for the foreseeable future.

I'm guessing the WD drives will be the least likely to suddenly die on me, given the age and useage, so my original idea was to grab another one of those, and just mirror them, but what kind of performance impact will this have?

The other option I'm thinking is RAID10 with the Hitachi drives - how will this impact the performance?

The other pros and cons I can think of for this are:

+ 4x capacity

- Older drives more likely to die
- Increased power consumption
- Increased heat output
- Much louder

I guess the other option would be RAID5 with the 3x WDs and a couple of extra 1TB, but that gives all the disadvantages of the RAID10 with the only possible advantage being performance?

The critical data will be backed up to Crashplan and Dropbox anyway, so ultimately it's not a huge issue if everything dies, but it will save me having to spend hours rebuilding and re-downloading everything.

So please help me OcUK, what is my best option?

 

[Deleted member 94233]

Keep it simple...

Personally I’m of the mind of keeping things nice and simple.

Like you my storage needs can be accommodated by a single, modern HDD i.e. data <4TB. If I had like 20TB of stuff I’d have no choice but to look at parity based resilience as mirrored storage becomes uneconomical and I need some redundancy.

I’m assuming you’re using the on-board controller so I’d just use a couple of the drives (whichever size you decide to use) in RAID1 or use a mirrored Storage Space if you’re on Windows 8.1

Advantages are they are exact duplicates so no messing about with parity calculation and it’s overhead (although this is not really an issue with modern CPUs) and the lengthy rebuilds in event of disk failure which opens the door to total data loss as I’ve not seen a non-server type motherboard that supports 2 disk parity like RAID6. And even that doesn’t factor in data corruption which can cause major issues with the parity calculations.

The drives can also be pulled and read on the vast majority of systems which is nice if you want to migrate the data. Lower power and noise too with only the disks you need. You then have plenty of drives to use a cold spares should you need them. You could add a third disk with no redundancy for a simple backup of the mirrored disks.

I’ve got 2x 3TB WD Reds in a simple 2 disk mirror on Windows 8.1 Storage Spaces. No issues with performance for me, I get around 110MB/s on large, sequential reads which is what I’d expect from these drives and that’s using ReFS too which inevitably adds some overhead.

In any case as you’re primarily using it for gaming we’re only talking saving a few seconds here and there on load time if at all so I really wouldn’t be concerned with getting every last MB/s of performance myself and go for what’s simplest

 

[Haggisman]

Sounds like the 2x WD it is then. Pretty much what I figured, but wanted a second opinion, cheers =)