Raid Questions

[Mamod334]

I was planning on adding some extra HDDs to my setup.

The HDDs that I'll be using:

2x WD 1TB SATAIII 7200rpm 64MB Cache
1x WD Caviar Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s
1x Corsair 60GB Force GT SSD

My idea was to run RAID 10 with the 3 WD drives for storage and then use the SSD as a boot drive.

My question is if i have the WDs in Raid 10 ( the two 1 TB striping and then a mirror on the 2TB ) Will i get the performance of RAID 0 but with the backup on the 2 TB Drive.
The reason i ask is will the performance of the 2 TB drive hold the 1TBs from RAID 0 performance.

If you hadn't already noticed I'm a Noob.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Surveyor]

Perhaps someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you can set up RAID 10 like that.

My understanding is that you need 4 disks.

Also RAID 10 isn't really a backup solution, it's for redundancy. If one drive fails you can carry on using the system while you replace the failed disk and the array is rebuilt.

If your PC was stolen, destroyed in a fire, suffered a catastrophic failure etc. the "backup" would be gone as well so it's not a backup.

If your idea is to use RAID for increased speed then you'd be better off using 2x1TB drives in RAID 0 and then carrying out regular backups to an external drive which can be stored away from the PC.

If you were thinking of getting WD Blacks then a much cheaper option is the Samsung F3. It's just as fast as the WD Black.

We're left with Samsung's Spinpoint F3, which is our clear favorite of the four. Not only does the F3 offer the best performance in all manner of sequential transfers, it's easily the quietest of the drives overall. I'm not thrilled by the fact that the F3's transaction rates drop off after 32 concurrent I/O requests, but that's not a condition many desktop users are likely to face. Besides, the Spinpoint certainly held its own in our disk-intensive multitasking tests, which are far more indicative of the sort of workloads produced by enthusiast desktops. Samsung doesn't give up much ground to the Caviar when it comes to random access times, either.

7,200-RPM terabytes from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD face off[/QUOTE]

The only advantage of the WD Black is the 5 year warranty.

Also I've found the Samsung 2TB F4 much faster than the WD Green drives.

If you're going down this route then I would go with two 1TB Samsung F3's in RAID 0 with an external 2 TB Samsung F4 for backup using a USB 3.0 dock or caddy.


FYI your signature is too big. A maximum of 4 lines of text are allowed.

 

[rpstewart]

The above is all correct

 

[vectisitch]

loving that wd 5 year warranty though

 

[Mamod334]

Thanks

Perhaps someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you can set up RAID 10 like that.

My understanding is that you need 4 disks.

Also RAID 10 isn't really a backup solution, it's for redundancy. If one drive fails you can carry on using the system while you replace the failed disk and the array is rebuilt.

If your PC was stolen, destroyed in a fire, suffered a catastrophic failure etc. the "backup" would be gone as well so it's not a backup.

If your idea is to use RAID for increased speed then you'd be better off using 2x1TB drives in RAID 0 and then carrying out regular backups to an external drive which can be stored away from the PC.

If you were thinking of getting WD Blacks then a much cheaper option is the Samsung F3. It's just as fast as the WD Black.



7,200-RPM terabytes from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD face off

The only advantage of the WD Black is the 5 year warranty.

Also I've found the Samsung 2TB F4 much faster than the WD Green drives.

If you're going down this route then I would go with two 1TB Samsung F3's in RAID 0 with an external 2 TB Samsung F4 for backup using a USB 3.0 dock or caddy.


FYI your signature is too big. A maximum of 4 lines of text are allowed.

That advice was invaluable and has saved me from wasting my money.
I think i will do Raid 0 and just back up to my NAS.

Thank you very much!

 

[Surveyor]

You're welcome.