hard drive faliure rates?

[all420]

Hi all. I am going to set up RAID on my new comp. I am debating between RAID 0 or 5. I would like to go w/ level 0 b/c of the higher performance. However, I just had my first HDD faliure a couple days ago. It was an IBM Deskstar SCSI drive cooled by a single fan. Do had drives fail often enough to warrant using the slightly lower performance RAID 5? I will be using the drives for my desktop system, containing everything I use on a day to day basis (vid editing progs, 3d modeling progs, web dev stuff). Although certinaly not mission-critcal, I would not like to reinstall my OS and everything along with it once every couple of months.

[Jon]

RAID 5 is definately safer and really isn't too far off of the performance of RAID, however, unless you have an extremely expensive IDE RAID controller that supports RAID 5 or are running Win2K Advanced Server with at least 4 hard drives, you aren't going to be able to run RAID 5.

Best bet would be to use RAID 0+1 which takes 4 disks but is just about as fast as RAID 0 and offers the redundancy of a mirrored set.

[dugans]

I haven't had any of the drives I bought new die on me yet- about 10 years now (although my oldest brand new hdd is maybe 5 yrs!) I have had some of my old drives die---120 mb, 540s and a few 1 or 2 gig scsi drives. Odds are they will last, although taking the rig to a lanparty , moving a lot etc, isn't good for them.

If its not mission critical go with speed, just back up your data.

[all420]

A couple of things. First of all I will be using SCSI, and I am getting a controller w/ support for level 5. Secondly doesn't RAID 5 use 3 instead of 4 HDD's? Third, one of the reasons that I was considering level 5 is because I don't have access to a backup media. I can't afford a tape drive, my network crashes everytime I try to send a large file across it, and I am running Linux so those "internet backup services" (btw do they actually work) wont run. Lastly, how big is the performance difference between 0 and 5?

[klosters64a]

I trust that you meant "Ultrastar" and "Deskstar" was a typo. www.storagereview.com now has a database of HDD reliability that 6000+ of its members have participated in. As a rule, SCSI HDD's are more durable than IDE drives and the process of RMAing them is streamilined compared to IDE's. Let's hope your warranty is still in effect, and that IBM's road-apple-on-the-customer's-head policy for RMAing 75 GXP IDE HDD's doesn't apply to the more costly SCSI drives too!

If it does, please post it!!