WD black 1TB x2 or WD RE3 x2 for raid??

[burningforce]

hello all, I been reading this section and what not for the past few weeks about raid and configurations. A lot of great info here and I am still trying to digest it all.

I just have a few question pertaining to HD quality and raid stuff.

question 1

I been reading around that WD black 1 TB drives fall out of the raid because of some recovery thing the HD does that makes the raid think it went off line(read of newegg). I know you can not trust newegg reviews that much due to high user errors from those people. But would it be better to buy another(already have 1) WD black 1TB drive or save for 2x RE3 drives? I really do not want to spend that kind of money for just storage. But if the black drives do not raid well I might have to :(

question 2

When I get the drive(s) and put them in a raid0(using motherboard) and I partition them, could I make another raid for raid1 using the remaining space? Or it does not work that way?

question 3
last question, I promise:beer:
I have a gigabyte EP45-UD3R board, should I use the gigabyte sata ports for the raid or use the regular sata ports that the board has? I looked around and could not find an answer to this question. well thats about it, thanks for the help:)

[dribblesnort]

Answer to QUESTION 1:
I have 3 WD Caviar Black 1TB Drives in Matrix RAID (0 array & a 5 array) and haven't seen any drives drop out of the array.

forget 2 drive raid. seriously. go with 3 caviar black drives. you can get 3 of them for the price of two RE drives, and three drive raid on the caviar blacks is pretty nice.

Answer to QUESTION 2:
You have a motherboard using the Intel ICH10R chip, so you can do a Matrix RAID array. (two different arrays on the same physical drives) I use RAID 0 (750GB) and RAID 5 (1.6TB) and I like the performance of my system, though windows 7 still ranks my drives as the slowest part (6.3 out of 7.9)

Answer to QUESTION 3:
Your board has the ICH10R and a JMicron controller that controls the 2 SATA ports that sit away from the others, as well as the PATA (normal IDE) ports. If you're going to use Matrix RAID, you need to use the ports that are yellow, not pink

[BossBorot]

I would take blacks over their enterprise drives any day for smaller raids

[MattNo5ss]

I also say go with the WDC Blacks.

If you really have some dough on you ($300/HDD), then get the new 2TB WDC Blacks with double the cache (64MB) and 50% higher platter density than the 1TB model for some serious speed and storage :p

[burningforce]

ok sounds good, thanks for the info

dribble, Boss, and matt :)

[Foolios]

three drive raid

now you can stripe three drives instead of two eh? How much performance gain do you think?

[cw823]

three drive raid

now you can stripe three drives instead of two eh? How much performance gain do you think?

You can stripe as many as you have ports, for the most part. Of course, if you stripe 6 drives, that is 6 points of failure. :confused:

[Foolios]

when does the performance gain taper off? I mean how beneficial is having 6 striped over 3 or 4 when compared to cost/performance? I am just curious of opinion. I don't need benchmarks or anything, just wondering...

[deathman20]

6 Drives might start getting to the high point to which the onboard controller can handle.

Personally though 2drives in raid is probably more then plenty for majority of people unless you do some serious video editing or something that you need huge amounts of data read or writen quickly.

[Foolios]

Thank you for the info. I have two. I usually jump onto the bandwagon. You kept me from needlessly doing that. =)

[tachi1247]

I realize that there is a huge difference in storage capacity, but wouldn't the best performance be had buying an SSD to run the OS and key programs off of and then a single hard drive for everything else?

Maybe it's just the way I use my computer, but it seems to me that the number of times I would write such large amounts of data to the disk drives such that the striping would create a significant performance advantage would be far outweighed by the instantaneous seek times and faster writes provided by the SSD.

With Intel's X25-M G2 drives available for under $250 it seems you would be better off getting one of those and then a cheaper slower drive to store all your data on. This should price out in the same range as the two RE3 drives you were considering.

[burningforce]

I realize that there is a huge difference in storage capacity, but wouldn't the best performance be had buying an SSD to run the OS and key programs off of and then a single hard drive for everything else?

Maybe it's just the way I use my computer, but it seems to me that the number of times I would write such large amounts of data to the disk drives such that the striping would create a significant performance advantage would be far outweighed by the instantaneous seek times and faster writes provided by the SSD.

With Intel's X25-M G2 drives available for under $250 it seems you would be better off getting one of those and then a cheaper slower drive to store all your data on. This should price out in the same range as the two RE3 drives you were considering.

well I already have one WD 1TB black so I can get another one for around $80-$100 and just raid them. I would like a SSD, but the price and low amount of space does not make it a good decision for me at this moment in time.