RAID 5 or not to RAID 5, thats my question...

[Reezer]

Not wanting to scare you Stelly, but a friend of mine has just had a RAID 5 setup on a 680i motherboard disappear (I think it was the 680i's on-board controller). BFG (the manufacturer) can't help him, he's lost a lot of data, and has got a 1GB NAS (Raid 1 I think) instead.

Hope that helps with the decision.

This was part of the reason I went for the card option myself. Not only are the motherboard chips inferior and can cause horror stories such as the above but they don't necessarily make arrays that are compatible with other boards raid controllers - when you upgrade you'll be very lucky to find your array works on your new board. Plus, if your motherboard goes pop you might struggle to get hold of one a year or more down the line.

I chose the LSI card in the end because LSI are one of the main manufacturers of enterprise-class server raid cards (hence the pci-x interface) so you'll always be able to find replacements if your card breaks and most of the cards are cross compatible with each others arrays.

See if you can find the equivalent PCI-E version of my card somewhere for a decent price, go on, you know you want to

 

[rpstewart]

Well worth it if you want some seriously safe data

You're data isn't truely safe with RAID5, all you have is hardware redundancy. You still need a backup.

Not wanting to scare you Stelly, but a friend of mine has just had a RAID 5 setup on a 680i motherboard disappear (I think it was the 680i's on-board controller). BFG (the manufacturer) can't help him, he's lost a lot of data,

As above

 

[EffBee]

Why make it that hard.

Modern drives are very big and very fast. DO you really need any gains that RAID might give. (I said "need" not "OOh would quite like to have ")

What about this....

Two big drives. Two partitions on each.
Drive One Partiton One: OS and anything else you fancy.
Drive One Partion Two: Backups of Drive Two Partiton One.
Drive Two Partion One: Whatever you want
Drive Two Partiton Two: Backups of Drive One Partiton One

Use Acronis (free trial available) or similar so your backups are compressed. Fix the sizes of the partitons to suit yourself. You can play with the resulting backup files moving them to portable USB devices or whatever to give yorself some protection against theft of entire system, disasters or hard disk failure.

If you really want to play safe put the drives on separate controllers. A duff controller would screw both physical drives if both were connected. Having said that though when did you last hear anyone having a disk controller go down on a motherboard.

I have to admit I'm not a great fan of RAID in a home environment. Its more suited to guaranteeing (!!) no downtime in corporate servers.

Have you seen the big thread in here somewhere where loaads of people have posted results from disk diagnostic utilities for various single hard drives and raid combinations?

 

[Stelly]

Decided to go RAID 1 with a Adaptec Card... its looking good, and I'm quiet confident that my data is safe from 1 HDD failure

Stelly