New Hard Drive setup. SSD + RAID5?

[Muel]

Howdo all,

I've had two seperate hard drives for the last year or more, one has just died taking all my video with it. I have one still working.

Now I only have 290gb of stuff to store, I'm thinking it might be a good time to re-assess my storage setup.

I'm thinking of getting a C300 64gb SSD for my OS, then 3x1tb Samsung F3s for RAID5? How will it perform? As long as RAID5 is as fast as a single F3 then I'm well happy.

Any advice/spec/pointers?

 

[Sh4rkie]

Your RAID 5 array even using software raid (ideally fakerake or even better hardware raid card) will be faster than a single drive. A simple mirror might be a better solution however depending on how you use your data. Two 2tb drives cost roughly the same as three 1tb drives. RAID 1 mirror uses very little overhead and while not as quick as RAID 5 might just be simplier and easier to implement. Plus you could always add a 3rd 2tb drive at a later point upgrading to RAID 5 when funds allow and double your storage. If you go 1tb now your expanion path might be more costly.

 

[Muel]

I thought about going to 3x2tb drives, but as it is I already have 2 1tb drives, so another would only cost £45. (Providing that the knackered one gets replaced on warranty).

If I get 3x2tb drives at 5,900rpm, I'd sell the two 1tb ones for say £60 profit after postage, then the three 2tb drives would cost £239.97, making the total cost of the upgrade £179.97. If I wanted 7200rpm drives the cost jumps to £341.97.

As I see it now, I can have a 2tb RAID0 setup for free once the knackered drive is replaced, or a 1tb (effectively) RAID1 setup for free, or a (effectively) 2tb RAID5 setup for £45.99. To get a 4tb RAID5 setup that gives the same performance would be £341.99. Not worth it IMO. 2tb will be more than enough I reckon, and works out far cheaper.

Anyone used the RAID controller on the Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H for RAID5? Any good?

 

[Zarf]

I thought about going to 3x2tb drives, but as it is I already have 2 1tb drives, so another would only cost £45. (Providing that the knackered one gets replaced on warranty).

If I get 3x2tb drives at 5,900rpm, I'd sell the two 1tb ones for say £60 profit after postage, then the three 2tb drives would cost £239.97, making the total cost of the upgrade £179.97. If I wanted 7200rpm drives the cost jumps to £341.97.

As I see it now, I can have a 2tb RAID0 setup for free once the knackered drive is replaced, or a 1tb (effectively) RAID1 setup for free, or a (effectively) 2tb RAID5 setup for £45.99. To get a 4tb RAID5 setup that gives the same performance would be £341.99. Not worth it IMO. 2tb will be more than enough I reckon, and works out far cheaper.

Anyone used the RAID controller on the Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H for RAID5? Any good?

I've seen benches somewhere, Think it does around 50MB/s writes. Read speeds are good though and you should be in the region of 200MB/s with a three drive setup.

I'm not sure where you get your pricing from, but 2TB Sammy F4's are around £60 each (got one here for £58.74 delivered on TWO a few weeks ago )

I'd encourage you to do as I did, get four of them and put them in a RAID10. Both Read and Write speeds are great, and it's a little bit safer than RAID5.

Another possibility, get yourself a 2TB drive in a USB 3.0 or eSATA caddy. Put your existing drives into RAID0, and have a nightly scheduled sync.
That way you get speed, value for money, and (if you unplug the drive and put it somewhere safe) protected from fire/theft/electrical surge/viruses/user error/filesystem corruption etc etc.
Backup is much better than RAID. RAID is about minimising downtime rather than data security.

 

[Muel]

I wasn't looking at Samsung drives, no faith in them any more! Still changing to 3x2tb F4 would cost me £131, and I'd have the slower ecogreen drives. The backup suggestion is a good one though. I might go for putting both my current F3s in RAID0, then backing that up manually to a 2tb external. Cheers.