Yay Raid!!
So i built this machine few years ago, and made a 500GB RAID 0 drive as my primary, 2 250GB drives. This past november, I picked up a 750 GB drive for cheap to use a backup drive.
Installed it, booted up the machine, and my Nvidia mobo software popups asking if I would like to add the new drive to my array, and then convert it to RAID 5. Why yes I would! Lost 500gb of usable space, (as each drive can't be over 250g), but the RAID 5 makes using a backup drive a moot point. Well 2 days ago, one of the 250g drives failed. This has forced me to order 3 1 TB drives to replace them all, but the computer is still running, and I can easily migrate each drive into the array, albeit slowly. Yay 2 TB RAID 5 FTW!!! |
Raid is a wonderful thing for reliability and up time :up:
But remember to have a plan for disaster recovery... |
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One day... Murphy's law... lightning... self!... :nope: But as said - not sure what the quoted phrase means. |
Ahh...
I bought the 750g drive to be used as a backup drive, in case one of the 2 250's failed, but since it easily incorporated the 750 into the raid, converting the RAID 0 into a RAID 5, it made MY need for a separate backup drive moot. Obviously there are instances where separate independent drives are needed, but I'm not one of them. When I get the 2 TB drive up and running, I will use the 750gb drive as a back up of my important files and such. |
Phew! Thank you!
I'm too easily worried on others behalf... :D |
Just noticed that i ordered 3 SATA2 drives, since the standard is supposed to be backwards compatible, and I'm throttled in other areas anyways, I shouldn't see a huge performance hit should I?
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Performance hit? Mechanical drives are completely incapable of saturating sata2.
Might wanna make sure you have sata3 board and drives if you go SSD though. |
IF I could afford 3 1 TB SSD's, I would.
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I bet. :haha:
Not like you really need it though. To be honest, if i might make a suggestion; maybe get a little faster drives. Don't think the 1TB ones are particularly fast. |
budget budget budget. This was a steal at 3 tb for $120. Open box from newegg.
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From the sounds of things it looks like you're using the RAID controller on the motherboard? If so, be carefull that if your board dies you'll need to get the exact same one, or one with the same exact chipset so the new controller can read the disk indexes to figure out the disk mapping. Quote:
The fastest IO I can get out of mine (a Dell Poweredge with a 6 port RAID 64 bit card using 5 WD RE5 500gb drives) is only sustained read or write of 65 mb/sec. Unless you use SSD, Raptor or 15k drives there's no way you'll need to worry about IO being a bottleneck as they'll never come close to their full 3 gb/sec rating. Now that the perpendicular magnetic storage is starting to trickle down to consumer level products these massive disks won't be such a liabilty to overheating or burning out prematurely. |
Ya I had 2x250GB Western Digital RE drives in a RAID0 for a while. Ran out of space though, just replaced it with a fast 640GB one. Don't think the benefits to general gaming are really that pronounced, can't say I notice the difference at least.
*why RAID5 btw? I get it for the reduncancy, but you lose performance gains. Unless you're running a server, I would really suggest RAID0. (And that you not put critical data on it, should it fail.) ** nvm, had my raid levels mixed up |
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Data is the most important thing, and hardest to replace. A raptor with a cheap equal sized sata drive to mirror it along with the RAID 5 on the server is pretty much bullet proof. If I had a couple TB drives I would make backups onto those every few weeks, otherwise just count on the integrity of the aray to do its job and be sure to make images of my OS drives every onece in awhile in case they do take a dive. |
Why raid 5 over raid 0?
The built in back up. I'm not a performance user, I can wait a few extra seconds for something. I'm still waiting for my new drives to arrive, and if I still had my raid 0 going, this disk failure would mean I wouldnt be talking to you guys, I would be assembling allmy original disks to reinstall. As it is, the system is much slower, but still usable. The nvidia software will allow me to hot swap the new drives, all i gotta do is plug each one in and let the software do the rest. |
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1 250gb 10k raptor drive is going to smoke a pair of 1 TB drives in a Raid 0 configuration. My OS drive (be it my server or my desktop) is always the fastest drive in terms of IO, all my data is kept on the Raid 5 array and just accessed via mapped drives. It's cheaper and easier to keep adding more 500gb drives to the Raid array when I need more space, put the new drive in the carriage and turn it on; expand the array and wait for it to re-write the parity and I'm good to go. Long as 2 drives don't fail simultaneously or consecutively my data is quite safe. Keep in mind my Raid array only has data on it. |
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