(I believe this is the place to talk about this, sorry if it isn't!)
Hi all!
So, I've picked my new case and I'm thinking about getting some large drives for a network RAID.
I know what you're going to say; "Why not just get a NAS box?" Well, I will do but in the future. I currently don't have enough money for one drive (I will do though!) let alone a £150 NAS box that does the same thing on my PC for nothing.
My motherboard is an M5A97 R2.0 board. The board can do RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10.
Out of these two, what would be the best one to use, bearing in mind I'm going to network it and connect my dad's machine to it so he can use it too?
Thanks everyone!
Well what do you want to accomplish with RAID?
RAID 0 will combine the disks in to one large disk and also increase the performance by reading and writing data in parralell. But if one disk fails you lose everything.
RAID 1 will mirror a disk so if the disk dies then the other disk takes over.
RAID 5 is similar to RAID 0 except that it also includes redundancy, one disk can fail without any data loss at the cost of the total space being the total space of the disks minus the space of one disk. so in your case RAID 0 would give you 8TB while RAID 5 would give you 6TB. But if more than one disk fails then you lose all the data.
RAID 10 is a combination of RAID 0 and 1, it mirrors a RAID 0 array. so you could have a RAID 1 of two RAID 0 arrays.
Which will work better for you is up to you, but remember, RAID is not backup, and in all of these set ups you run the risk of losing all your data. RAID is designed for use in situations where availability and performance are important.
There are other options than RAID for combining disks, you can span multiple disks to give you one logical volume. You don't get the performance of RAID 0 but it is possible to recover data if one of the disks fails. You could also use ZFS instead of RAID 5, again it doesn't have the same performance but it is more secure. And you can use backups instead of RAID 1 or 10, these are really meant for availability rather than backup.
Personally I use software called snapraid to give me disk redundancy without the risk of total data loss. It's good for when the data isn't changed often like in a media library as snapraid doesn't work in real time, it takes a snapshot. So if you need to write a lot or modify files often then something like that isn't for you, but for large static libraries it works well.
Dexter covers pretty much what I would have said. Although I will add do not use RAID 5 on a motherboard solution. Performance will be severely degraded due to the calculations involved. If you want to use RAID 5 you'll need to pick up a dedicated controller for the best performance.
Thanks for the replies!
I'm looking to make a RAID for my network so my dad and I can store our video files and music, and other things like that.
I know it's not ideal, but eventually when I fork up enough money to buy a decent NAS box I'll dump the drives in there.
I was thinking RAID 0 so I could just share one drive, or RAID 1 so I have backups.
The main point of me doing this is to store videos, music, and large files. :)
Do RAID 10. That way stripes data across mirrors so you have speed + redundancy. Better yet, when you end up building that NAS, you can split the two mirrored drives off and put them in the NAS, then move all your data from the old array to the new one, and throw the last two back in the new array as mirrors of the first two.
If you did RAID 0 across all the drives, you would lose all data in the whole 8TB array if one dies, you wouldn't be able to move the drives to the new NAS when you build it without losing all the data because hardware raid is not compatible across different controllers (except mirroring I think). Same deal with RAID 5, your controllers would have to be the same exactly or you'd be tossing all the data on the array.