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Raid arrays - any advice?

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Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.18 16:22:00 - [1] So I've been putting off slotting in some of the extra drives I have as it would require me to reinstall my OS, but I've got some time off work soon and I'm going to bite the bullet and scrub all my existing drives down. My question is this: If you had my system, how would you arrange your arrays? Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Motherboard AMD Phenom 9600 4Gb 1066Mhz DDR2 RAM 2x 3870HD 4x Western Digital 250Gb 8Mb Cache 7200RPM 2x Western Digital 500Gb 30Mb Cache 7200RPM The motherboard has two raid controllers; one AMD SB600 and one Marvell 6121. The SB600 supports 0,1 & 0+1 and the 6121 supports 0 & 1. Currently I'm thinking of connecting the four 250s to the SB600 and setting up a raid 0+1 to get the striping and mirroring, and using this as my system, programs & pagefile drive and connecting the two 500s in a raid 0 configuration for use as my games drive. Storage is taken care of on a different machine. Would anyone recommend another configuration? Either RAID controller can be booted from. - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
Crumplecorn Gallente Eve Cluster Explorations	Posted - 2009.03.18 16:44:00 - [2] I'd buy a NAS and use RAID 5. In fact I will be doing exactly that, when I have the money. - DesuSigs
Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.18 16:53:00 - [3] Originally by: Crumplecorn I'd buy a NAS and use RAID 5. In fact I will be doing exactly that, when I have the money. I can't see this providing a performance benefit for me though given the network bottleneck of a gigabit and latency times... Currently I have a machine running in my loft that provides NAS functionality for me. It's an old HP server my work were throwing out, and runs RAID 1 with 500Gb of storage that I use to keep "stuff" on. - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
KingsGambit Caldari Knights	Posted - 2009.03.18 17:27:00 - [4] It really depends on what you're after, performance or redundancy. A Raid 0 (striped) array offers the biggest performance boost of all RAID types but halves your redundancy (assuming 2 hard drives). A Raid 1 (mirrored) array offers no performance boost at all but gives you the most redundancy of any other RAID type (double in the case of two drives). Personally, I don't know why you would have 6 hard drives in a PC. As well as power usage, heat/noise and physical space in the case, it's a lot of management when you can get hard drives now 1TB alone. If it were me, I would prob mirror the 2x 500GB drives for use on that machine, which means in the case of a faulty HDD, I can still run off the other. I would put the 4x 250GB drives into a PC or NAS supporting RAID5, which would give approx 700-720GB usable space (after formatting and RAID 5) as a network file store (eg music, videos, photos, etc). RAID5 offers a great trade off between performance increase and redundancy (though not as significantly as 0 or 1 respectively). With RAID5, you can actually continue accessing your data even if one drive in the array goes down, albeit slower (the controller has to calculate the missing data on-the-fly) and when you get a replacement, can simply add it to the array in place of the faulty one and it gets rebuilt. If 2 drives both go down at the same time, or ANY drive in a striped array, you will lose all the data. -------------
Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.18 18:38:00 - [5] The reason I'm using so many drives is that it's existing kit - I'm not buying anything here. - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
Taedrin Gallente Golden Mechanization Protectorate	Posted - 2009.03.18 20:06:00 - [6] Originally by: KingsGambit It really depends on what you're after, performance or redundancy. A Raid 0 (striped) array offers the biggest performance boost of all RAID types but halves your redundancy (assuming 2 hard drives). A Raid 1 (mirrored) array offers no performance boost at all but gives you the most redundancy of any other RAID type (double in the case of two drives). Personally, I don't know why you would have 6 hard drives in a PC. As well as power usage, heat/noise and physical space in the case, it's a lot of management when you can get hard drives now 1TB alone. If it were me, I would prob mirror the 2x 500GB drives for use on that machine, which means in the case of a faulty HDD, I can still run off the other. I would put the 4x 250GB drives into a PC or NAS supporting RAID5, which would give approx 700-720GB usable space (after formatting and RAID 5) as a network file store (eg music, videos, photos, etc). RAID5 offers a great trade off between performance increase and redundancy (though not as significantly as 0 or 1 respectively). With RAID5, you can actually continue accessing your data even if one drive in the array goes down, albeit slower (the controller has to calculate the missing data on-the-fly) and when you get a replacement, can simply add it to the array in place of the faulty one and it gets rebuilt. If 2 drives both go down at the same time, or ANY drive in a striped array, you will lose all the data. Incorrect. RAID 0 is simple data striping and has NO redundancy AT ALL. It has improved read AND write performance. There is no backup. RAID 1 CAN have a significant performance boost to read operations, as both disk have the same data available to them. There is nothing stopping the RAID array from utilizing both disks for the read operation. However, there is no performance boost to write operations. RAID 5 has improved read performance, but a significantly decreased write performance. This is because the RAID array has to write parity information, which takes extra time. However, parity information can be ignored during a read operation, so read operations are actually faster than RAID 0, since RAID 5 needs an extra drive in the array (and since parity information is staggered across the drives).
Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.18 21:43:00 - [7] Quote: Incorrect. RAID 0 is simple data striping and has NO redundancy AT ALL. It has improved read AND write performance. There is no backup. I think what he meant by halving redundancy is it doubles the failure rate, as the array requires both drives to be in good health, and all data is lost. Poor choice of wording is all. Quote: RAID 1 CAN have a significant performance boost to read operations, as both disk have the same data available to them. There is nothing stopping the RAID array from utilizing both disks for the read operation. However, there is no performance boost to write operations. This is the big one for me; I use RAID5 for all the drives at my work as it provides a good balance of performance, redundancy and simplicity, but for a home gaming computer where my data is not in the slightest important I wondered whether RAID1 was worth bothering with; is there any serious performance overhead with write operations on RAID1? It's looking like RAID01 still for the 4x250 drives (system/pagefile), but I'm still torn on what to do with the pair of 500's, which will be used to store programs such as Eve on. - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
Grimpak Gallente Celestial Horizon Corp. I.C.C Industrial Drive Yards	Posted - 2009.03.18 23:01:00 - [8] Originally by: Camilo Cienfuegos but I'm still torn on what to do with the pair of 500's, which will be used to store programs such as Eve on. 1 for **, the other for programs/games/whatev. done --- Quote:** The more I know about humans, the more I love animals. ain't that right.
Windle Poons Amarr Ankh-Morpork City Watch	Posted - 2009.03.18 23:14:00 - [9] I'd mostly be concerned that I had 6 Western Digital disks! Make sure one is always spare for when the others die.
Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.19 00:05:00 - [10] Originally by: Grimpak 1 for <prawns>, the other for programs/games/whatev. I have a NAS server for stuff, so storage isn't really an issue. Originally by: Windle Poons I'd mostly be concerned that I had 6 Western Digital disks! Make sure one is always spare for when the others die. You know something? In the 12 years I've been building my own computers I've yet to have a hard drive fail on me, and I've always used Western Digital & Maxtor drives. Also, aren't you dead? - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
Crumplecorn Gallente Eve Cluster Explorations	Posted - 2009.03.19 03:05:00 - [11] Originally by: Windle Poons I'd mostly be concerned that I had 6 Western Digital disks! Make sure one is always spare for when the others die. Their external drives are awful, two have failed on me completely randomly, prompting the NAS plan, but their internals have always served me well. KACHUNK - DesuSigs
KingsGambit Caldari Knights	Posted - 2009.03.19 08:59:00 - [12] Originally by: Taedrin Incorrect. RAID 0 is simple data striping and has NO redundancy AT ALL. It has improved read AND write performance. There is no backup. I know that, and actually it is correct. By striping 2 disks, you double the risk of data loss due to drive failure...or conversely you could say you half redundancy. In the case of 3 discs in RAID0, you triple the chance, etc. This is because if any of the drives in the stripe fails, all data on all drives is lost. Originally by: Taedrin RAID 1 CAN have a significant performance boost to read operations, as both disk have the same data available to them. Can is very much the operative word. Despite it being technically possible, I've never encountered a RAID controller that actually offers this benefit. I personally use a mirrored array at home and it doesn't perform any better than other PCs I use regularly. It would be nice if it did tho I expect you'd need hardware and/or software specifically designed to take advantage of it, would love to know if anything did. -------------
FireFoxx80 Caldari E X O D U S Imperial Republic Of the North	Posted - 2009.03.19 12:11:00 - [13] Depends on how important the data is really. At home, I have a server with the following configuration: 1x 120GB Boot drive 2x 320GB RAID 1 Photographs, personal documents, unreplaceable stuff. (also backed up to eSATA disk) 4x 750GB RAID 5 Media, stuff which is replacable, but is a pain to find again. What I do the rest of the time
Camilo Cienfuegos Earned In Blood	Posted - 2009.03.19 15:46:00 - [14] The data on this machine isn't important at all - it's only for gaming, and anything of importance will be stored remotely. - Originally by: The Cuckoo Good luck in defending idiotic and greedy noobs, as far as I'm concerned, you are their champion.
Ryysa Paisti Paisti Syndicate	Posted - 2009.03.20 14:33:00 - [15] Why are you making a RAID setup if you are going to be gaming? Besides the initial loading time, most of the data when gaming is random access... RAID actually increases seeking times due to the overhead involved and that two drives have to seek instead of one. Also, neither of your "RAID controllers" is "real". It's all fake software raid. I would only use RAID on a FRAPS drive or some other drive that does a lot of sequential reading and/or writing. Anything that is based mainly on random access does not benefit from raid. For games I would get a couple of new tech Samsung 128GB SSD's off E-bay and RAID0 those... EW Guide - Music Downloader - My Music
Dantes Revenge Caldari	Posted - 2009.03.21 11:42:00 - [16] Edited by: Dantes Revenge on 21/03/2009 11:45:11 By the time you've spent out for a raid controller, disks and then added a value to the time it takes to set up etc, you may as well invest in the much faster solid state disks. There are cheaper alternatives for home users if you look around and they offer a far better performance boost than raid arrays for both read and write operations. Edit: Linky. -- Originally by: CCP Whisper No it is not an official statement. Not everything surrounded by blue bars is an official statement which can be quoted as fact until the end of time. Deal with it.

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