raid for disk drives

[paul10]

HI i already own a wd 4tb black disc drive for photos , video ,music etc should i purchase another for raid usage what kind of gains will i see ,i have just benched my existing black wd drive and have noticed a little improvement on read /writes by swapping out my motherboard do not know why exactly ,probably bottle necked by sata2 on my old motherboard ,i already use a ssd drive samsung 850 pro for my boot drive which has also seen a good improvement with my new motherboard also ,everything gets backed up to my wd my book 4tb ,just want to know because a ssd drive at 4tb is still a £1000 pound also how easy to set up for raid in windows ,and which type of raid ?

Any info gratefully recieved.

 

[anruari]

The WD Black is a SATAIII high speed drive. If you linked a pair of these in a striped configuration (Raid 0) you could potentially see an improvement in speeds - but you would need a carefully matched drive. You would definitely need a backup, as if either drive died you'd loose the whole volume as you cant recover a failed Raid 0 config.

Another option to consider could be getting a small (maybe 64GB) high speed SSD and use that as a cache drive set to "maximum performance" between the OS and the HDD.
this would result in all write operations being directed to the SSD, and then transfered to the HDD at a later time, while read operations would be cached for any regularly accessed data.
Another option would be to combine the two options. (do both).
assuming your mobo supports it both intel and AMD provide hardware based caching for this method subject to activating the drivers. if not there are software based options.

a second option would be to install a Raid 0 or 10 of SSHD's as these are only marginally more expensive than HDD's, but you'd need a matched set.

 

[skyripper]

In theory you could see double the read speeds.
But you'd have a single RAID0 array totalling 8TB of space.
One glitch at the controller layer, or one drive failing to spin up properly on boot and you could end up with 8TB of unreadable data (because the controller has decided the drives are out of Sync).

This is assuming you are running the onboard Intel raid controller, and not a proper hardware Raid card (which will deal with errors and issues more gracefully).

I'd recommend JBOD your hard drives and moving working files/processing to your SSD and then moving it back to your drives when complete.

 

[Huntyz]

I've used raid 0 for years without issue on HDDs and SSDs but I have a NAS I back everything up on just incase.

But it's worked well with 2 WD Blacks and 2 850 Evos.