RAID refresher course needed please.

jigger · 23 May 2008 at 17:02

It's been a long time since i last used a RAID Array.

Im thinking of a three drive setup but im unsure weather to stripe two drives and use the other for backup or have all three striped with parity. So im looking for some help as i cant remember the the good and bad points between the two or what size stripe to use, it's for a glorified desktop system so the file swaps will be allshorts of sizes.

Cheer's
jigger.

Greenlizard0 · 23 May 2008 at 17:43

I'm not certain on this - but if you want to RAID them all like that then you might need a fourth hard drive.

I'd personally set two up in a RAID array and keep the other for backup (what models and capacity are the drives btw?). It's always good to backup and backup again

jigger · 23 May 2008 at 18:21

Yeh, i like to have things well coverd in regards to backing up too, the drives are Samsung Sata2 T166 500gig's.

Just had a look at my motherboard and it has the option for a RIAD 5 array, which i think is striped with the parity split between the drives, anyone using RAID 5 ?

marscay · 24 May 2008 at 11:25

raid 5 on the motherboard isn't the greatest ide tbh, apart from the fact that it's write performance is very slow they're generally pretty good at dropping drives from the array also which is a nice feature.

if you have 3 drives and you just want some parity i would just use 2 in a raid 1 mirror, you'd be better off buying another drive so you could use the third and have 4 drives in raid 1.

of course you could just try raid 5 onboard but don't start crying if it's rebuilding you're array once a week.