• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Does this setup make sense for Matrix RAID?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Revivalist

Member
Joined
Mar 27, 2005
Location
Fresno, CA
I'm building a new system with an ASUS Rampage II Extreme, i7 920, OCZ Reaper (1866MHz 8-8-8), etc. . .

I also want to pick up some hard drives for a Matrix RAID setup. I've been reading all over the place that the 640GB WD Black seems to be one of the fastest drives around right now. So I was thinking I would go with 4 x 640GB WD Caviar Black. That gives me a total of 2.56TB.

I figured I could slice out 25GB from each drive to put in RAID 0 for a 100GB system drive. That's about all I need for Windows and programs.

Then the remaining 2.56TB I thought I could setup in a RAID 0+1. I have a lot of documents, photos, and videos that I really want to make sure are backed up. So I figured the RAID 0+1 setup will give me the mirrored redundancy for backup, and also the performance of two striped drives. If I understand correctly, the read speed will be theoretically 4x and the write speed will be theoretically 2x. (I emphasize "theoretically.") Please correct me if I'm off about how this all works.

I'm also going to manually backup my data on occasion to my 750GB WD drive. The reason is because even though a mirrored array is nice because the data is backed up automatically all the time, the problem I see is that if I corrupt a document, accidentally delete it, or modify it the wrong way and save it, then I can't go to my backup on the mirrored drive to retrieve it because the document will be altered or deleted there as well, right? . . . So I'm thinking that doing the old fashioned manual back up is a good idea also just in case I need to go back to an old version of a document.

Please let me know if my understanding is correct about this whole Matrix RAID thing for redundancy and performance. I appreciate the feedback because it may affect what drives I choose to buy. I don't want to pull the trigger unless I'm sure about the way I'm going to be setting up the drives.

Thanks for any input! :)
 
Last edited:
Back