Hard drive, raid setup query

mpj88 · 3 Dec 2008 at 21:17

Hi, i am looking at buying some large hdds for storing media on and i was wondering what the best raid setup up i should use. Was thinking of maybe 4 1tb drives, would like to have 2 spare sata sockets for 2 320s in raid 0 for OS. If necessary i could fit more in but the other 2 sockets are JMicron so would i have to have the OS disks on those? Are these sockets the same performance? Obviously would like the most space available, but still some reasurance that i wont loose all my data! Motherboard as in sig. Which says i have the choice of RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5.
Thanks

psd99 · 4 Dec 2008 at 06:37

Well it depends what you are looking for. Looks like storage.

I would chose RAID 0 over them all because with the others you will lose a drive for redundancy if that does bother you.

Get yourself an external drive for backing up most important data on a periodic basis.

rpstewart · 4 Dec 2008 at 08:43

RAID isn't essential and for bulk data storage isn't necessarily the best option. Remember that while RAID1,5 &10 provide redundancy they are not backup solutions so you'll still need to do that on top of whatever you decide to do.

I have my main storage on RAID5 but that's simply because I don't have the time to restore 4Tb of backups (which I do have!). It's also all hooked up to a Highpoint RR2320 controller because mobo based RAID5 write performance is still pretty woeful.

gordan · 5 Dec 2008 at 12:34

You can work around needing backups using shadowcopy (Windows) or something like copyfs stackable file system in Linux. It'll save an undo log for all files so you can roll back to any previous version. That + RAID1/5/6/10 ought to keep your data reasonably safe.

Pandobear · 5 Dec 2008 at 13:25

the other way around this is to add the drives seperately, making sure that any critical data is replicated on another of the drives. At worst you would only lose a percentage of your data then on a drive loss. This option will allow you to use the jMicron controller for two of the storage drives, rather than having to use these for your main OS drives