First, I must state, I am a noob when it comes to raid arrays, and things alike it. I will probably use termonology that is not correct. I was wondering if it is possible to take a 5 sata port, pcie raid card with 5xSSDs to make a raid 0 array, then have the ability to back that up to a HDD (daily or weekly if by hardware, software, auto or manual, etc.) while only updating changes and not the whole shebang everytime. I hope to learn from you!
I wouldn't recommend a RAID 0 array. Go with RAID 5 or 6.
I'm not familiar enough with RAID to tell you exactly how 5 and 6 works exactly, but I do know it distributes data amongst all the drives, and should a drive fail, it would still function, and it would rebuild the array once the dead drive was replaced. RAID 6 and tolerate up to 2 simultaneous drive failures, but you get less space.
With 5 drive RAID 5, you'd have 80% of total disk space available to use, and with RAID 60% of total. So, if you have 5x 120GB SSDs in RAID, you'd have a 480GB RAID 5, or 360GB RAID 6.
You could also do a nested RAID, or RAID within a RAID.
I have somewhat did some research and discovered some options. Make a RAID 1 with an about 5 ssd in RAID 0 and a HDD. (not sure if that would defeat the purpose in speed of the RAID 0). Maybe a 100 ssd RAID 0 XD with a manual backup every time I start the PC or somthing. I still may never have to money to do this, I was mostly curious. Also I was not in priority of redundancy, but speed with a safety backup mechanism thing. Thanks!
Are you going for read speed or write? A RAID 1 has a read benefit (since data is mirroed, it has multiple sources to read from), but zero speed benefit. RAID 0 has both read and write benefit, but if you had two 3 RAID 0 arrays in a RAID 1 configuration, you would get some write benefit, but a massive read speed benefit. But this is mostly for sustained speeds and won't do you any good unless you're editing 4K video.
Anyway, if you really wanted speed, I wouldn't bother with RAID. The whole purpose of RAID is redundancy, hence the name: Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID 0 isn't even a proper RAID configuration because of that. For true speed, go for a single PCI-e based SSD. It could M.2, SATA Express, or an actual PCI-e card, but PCI-e is faster with less overhead compared to SATA for SSDs.
My assumption to why RAID 0 is called RAID 0 is from zero redundancy (IDK).
But to clarify I was specifically looking for mass (5TB+) of super fast game load times in something like Skyrim. Probably stupidly overkill for it. While wanting the backup so I don't cry when a SSD fails and lose all my saves and stuff. Trying to do a highly custom design for a $5-10k pc (not that I'll ever be likely to purchase it).
I wish there was a PCI-E with 5TB+ of storage, I have looked in a couple of places and have not found anything like it, I have heard of PCI-E cards that allow for putting in M.2 drives, but not a lot (4, 6, 8, etc.) of them.
This won't contribute much to what you want, but more to caution. If you plan to RAID SSDs, make sure you can successfully have TRIM supported through RAID, otherwise it will slow down considerably. The only RAID I know that works on SSD so far is RAID 0 on an Intel platform.
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From what I just read, TRIM seems like it would be a good factor to consider. I have an assumption that by the time I would ever consider going with this ridiculous storage option on this $10k build there will be 2tb SSD or hopefully a 5tb+ not to mention other new components. And to be honest I have never used more than 500gb, but I have not bought many games or videos to put on that drive. I was more curious in RAID and its capabilities, especially if I had $10k or so forced to spend on a PC build.