Proper way to set up SSD raid on a home pc?

Hey guys,
I was thinking of buying 3xSamsung 870QVO 8TB SSDs to set up a Raid5 for my desktop gaming PC. My main purpose for the raid would be to significantly decrease the likelihood of data loss as I use my gaming PC as a workstation as well and store some creative work on it that I don’t want to lose. I am running an Asus X670E Crosshair motherboard and since I saw some video from Wendell explaining that hardware raid was dead, I just wanted to make sure that running a raid5 was a good idea and also to find out what would be the best way to implement that (Running a linux). Thanks.

I won’t bore you with the caveats etc but I feel its important to mention since you stated it isn’t just for fun: Have regular backups first, preferably to a different machine on a different power circuit. RAID won’t save you from a power surge, PSU failure, partitioning-mishap, etc.

If it is only running Linux, you have basically two options: MD RAID and ZFS (btrfs RAID5/6 is officially unstable).

If the thought of out-of-tree kernel modules and sticking to slightly older than bleeding-edge kernel versions concerns you, use MD. Otherwise I’d recommend ZFS, since it is bullet-proof and has features nothing else has, so I’ll only describe that now :slight_smile:

Exact steps depend on your distro. If you have a distro already running how you want, then it is straight-forward to convert it to ZFS:

Partition each SSD with an ESP partition and a ZFS partition (start with the size only as large as you need initially, ZFS pool size is easy to grow but impossible to shrink). Create the pool, create dataset for your distro rootfs, and /home (isolate so you can rollback OS updates if needed). Add ZFS module to your initramfs config, rebuild the initramfs and copy your UEFI loader/config/kernel/initramfs to all ESPs.

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I have a feeling they haven’t improved AMDraid from x570

The only thing was decent was using madam on linux

Backup to Google Drive / One drive just the saved files?

Wait, what? Oh, you mean mdadm :stuck_out_tongue:

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Buy more smaller SSDs like 6x 4TB ones and then use storage spaces mirrors with columns equal to the count of disks in the pool.

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Yeah that’s the one

Just skip it and back it up with Veeam Endpoint (Free)

You’ll have to back it up anyway, so there is no point in a RAID5 here. RAID is for reliability and not having to reboot a machine in production, not for saving data

“RAID is for” seems an odd statement. People use things they want to use it for. Some use RAID for uptime, some use it in place of a backup, others use it for performance, others use it simply to get one big drive instead of multiple ones.

Use technology as you see fit, there is no single route to Rome. :wink:

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