Should I go RAID 5

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Morning All

I am considering what HDD config to install in my new rig. I have normally gone down the RAID 0 route over the last 2 builds and backing up to a 3rd separate hard drive but I was wondering if it’s time for a bit of a change. I was thinking about RAID 5 with 3 disks, something like the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 Gig when it’s released running on a 680i board. I know it’s mostly overkill for what it normally a gaming rig but was an idea on an otherwise dull Wednesday :( . Anybody any idea of the pros or cons to such a setup?

Thanks

Peter
 
Raid 5 will give you great fault tolerance. if a disk fails the array will carry on in a degraded state until the faulty disk is replaced. Its also fairly fast but not as fast as Raid 0 which doesnt offer any fault tolerance.

Depends on what you want to do.

I have 2x74gb raptors in raid 0 for os and games for speed. then 8x400gb hdds in RAID for all my backups/mp3s/movies etc for tolerance
 
Depends on what you want and the cost....

RAID0
pros - fast, minimum 2 disks, all space is available,
cons - no redundancy (lose one disk, lose the lot)

RAID5
pros- fast (not as fast as 0), redundancy (you can lose one disk without losing data, but lose 2 at same time lose the lot)
cons - minimum 3 disks, approx 1 disk is used for parity so you dont get all available space (i.e 3x100gb disks in raid 5, you will only have 200gb space)

For a gaming system I would stick to 2 disk RAID 0 and backup vital data to 3rd disk.....
 
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I won't touch RAID 0 with a barge pole - two disks in RAID 0 is double the chance of total loss than an individual disk.

And now that disks are reaching insane capacities like 1TB I no longer even trust my data to individual disks. When I build my next system next year I'll be having RAID 5 without question.

Oh, and yes, I've heard of backups. :)
 
Personally I'd just stick to making regular backups.
RAID 5 really is not aimed at the home market.
Write performance is slow due to the way parrity is written across all of the disks in the array.
RAID 5 is design to offer redundency and good read performance, hence the reason you'll mainly find it inside servers.
However at the same time you will also find expensive and semi-expensive RAID controllers looking after things.
You can do RAID 5 on the cheapest/onboard controllers these days, hay, you can even do it in software.
I wouldn't want to however - there is a reason expensive RAID 5 cards exist.

If you want performance at home stick to RAID 0.
 
RichDuffy said:
I won't touch RAID 0 with a barge pole - two disks in RAID 0 is double the chance of total loss than an individual disk.

And now that disks are reaching insane capacities like 1TB I no longer even trust my data to individual disks. When I build my next system next year I'll be having RAID 5 without question.

Oh, and yes, I've heard of backups. :)
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You should still use backups even with raid 5.... as this does not protect against corruption within your files.... ;)
 
Eggy said:
You should still use backups even with raid 5.... as this does not protect against corruption within your files.... ;)
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Indeed :) It's just normally people's first reaction to assume that because I'm worried about data loss I must be rubbish at backing stuff up. My point is just how much of a pain it is to backup to and restore from dozens of dvds... :)
 
if you want some fault tolerance i'd consider raid-5, however i'd hugely prefer an intel based board rather than the 680i if i didn't have a raid card.

software XOR calculations are quite slow and give modest write speeds but prepare to cough up a few hundred pound for a decent raid card.
 
I had my system set up with 3 250GB hard drives and, although RAID 5 was quite quick at reading, the writing times were awful. I split the RAID and I am running 2 mirrored drives (with important data and MP3's etc) and one single drive with my OS and games etc. I'm not too bothered if it fails because I don't really keep anything that important on it. I keep an image of my single drive on the mirrored drives so I can quickly restore if a failure does occur. I have had 3 failures so far in the 3 months I have had these 3 times wich means roughly 1 drive failure every month ;)

Back-up is EXTREMELY important but I would say RAID 5 isn't the best method for a normal desktop PC. ;)
 
vipergrm said:
I had my system set up with 3 250GB hard drives and, although RAID 5 was quite quick at reading, the writing times were awful. I split the RAID and I am running 2 mirrored drives (with important data and MP3's etc) and one single drive with my OS and games etc. I'm not too bothered if it fails because I don't really keep anything that important on it. I keep an image of my single drive on the mirrored drives so I can quickly restore if a failure does occur. I have had 3 failures so far in the 3 months I have had these 3 times wich means roughly 1 drive failure every month ;)

Back-up is EXTREMELY important but I would say RAID 5 isn't the best method for a normal desktop PC. ;)
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This pretty much hits it on the head - and with something like Acronis you can set it to do the backups automatically when the machine is idle so you don't have to worry about it. Obviously you are still at risk as all the material is inside one case, and within one OS install so virus/total hardware failure could still wipe you out. Just comes down to how serious the loss would be compared to how far you're willing to go to protect your setup.

Personally I'm going to be moving across to Windows Home Server when I can be bothered to get it set up, that way all of my machines will be backed up on a separate system in a different location - I don't really have anything critical so it's more because I can than anything else - but I have to say I've been really impressed by the WHS concept and can't wait to get the Beta up and running :)
 
Next games rig will be

RAID0 2 drives for OS
RAID0 2 drives for Apps
Extra HD for small amout of data / CD images

I have other PCs for important stuff.

This is where I think Microsoft Home Server will come in handy, can have RAID0 for things that can lose, important stuff served of a more reliable box
 
im curious how much of a performance gain you actually get from raid0, is it worth doing?
 
n3x said:
im curious how much of a performance gain you actually get from raid0, is it worth doing?
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Given how easy it is to set up with on-board Raid controllers, and how good some of the new ones are, you really can't go wrong - if you've got 2 drives it is basically a free speed upgrade. Whether you'll notice much of a difference depends on what you use your machine for - Web browsing, listening to music/ watching movies, word processing: not really. Playing games with large level loads (BF2, Oblivion, Gothic 3): Definitely!
 
My PC (when I get all parts ;) ) will have no data on. I am planning on using my old PC as a file server. Data will be backed up from one HDD to another, and if that aint enough... my personal files will be synced to my PC plus 2 laptops :D
 
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