Raid advice.

Martel · Jan 9, 2010

I've been running raid 0 for quite some time now. Just bought 3 WD 500 Black drives, my thought is to switch over to raid 5. Any thoughts? Should I stick with raid 0? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

ThePerfectCore · Jan 9, 2010

What are you hoping to accomplish with RAID 5 vs 0?

I'm going to assume that you chose RAID 0 in the first place for speed and not redundancy (because there isn't any).

As I'm sure you know, RAID 0 isn't really RAID, it's just AID, or SAID, as some would call it, "suicidal array of independent disks".

RAID 5 is RAID 0 with one drive acting as a parity drive, which will add a level of redundancy to your array. RAID 0 rules still apply, all disks must be the same size. The total usable size of the array with 2 500GB disks will be 1TB.

RAID 5 write performance is at best the same as RAID 0, but will probably be worse with the parity drive in the mix. Reads are slightly slower too, but not as bad as writes.

In closing: RAID 0 if you are a performance nut, RAID 5 if want redundancy with slightly reduced performance.

Martel · Jan 10, 2010

I wanted the redundancy... Now I am leaning towards speed again.... Well, computer is coming down now, guess I better make my decision. Thanks for the response.

pik4chu · Jan 10, 2010

for a time I rand RAID 5 as the primary drive set in a rig and I gotta say it leaves something to be desired. It just felt a bit slow for a workstation. In a server RAID 5 is fine though.

What you should do is stick with RAID 0 with two of the drives and use the third for backups

Martel · Jan 10, 2010

I stuck with raid 0. 3 500 in raid 0 with 1 500 and 1 TB drive for backups.

ThePerfectCore · Jan 11, 2010

Wow. 3 new drives in RAID 0? You'd better do those backups often.

pik4chu · Jan 11, 2010

People kind of exxagerate RAID 0 failure rate a bit. Its not like your are initiating the apocolypse by going with RAID 0 it just means you have to have backups or you will lose everything. Yes the more drives you put in raid 0 the higher your chances for loss are but we are still talking about new, reliable hard drives here, you don't have to wake up each morning wondering if your computer has died that night

ThePerfectCore · Jan 11, 2010

pik4chu said:
new, reliable hard drives

Such a thing does not exist. Convincing yourself that new = reliable is a great way to get burned.

Here is a bathtub curve:

http://www.cable360.net/images/articles/33190_1230149105.gif

The chances of death due to infant mortality are high, add (or multiply, as the case may be) on top of that the fact that it's all in RAID 0, and (statistically) the data is safer scrawled onto a piece of notebook paper.

If it's still running in a year or so then it may have proved itself reliable, but right now, these numbers make my gonads retract.

Martel · Jan 11, 2010

My last array ran for about three years with zero problems. Yes, my chances are higher for failure, I have had 1 in 20 drives fail so far. Not the greatest odds at that, but as long as my important data is backed up then who cares about my saved games and OS. All my progs can be reinstalled at any time.

TheGreySpectre · Jan 11, 2010

does your card support raid 10? that might be a good option if you want speed and redudancy

Martel · Jan 12, 2010

Someone mentioned that to me, I just don't like the idea of a 50% loss of space. I think my current setup backedup onto a TB drive should work out for me.

Creegz · Jan 12, 2010

ThePerfectCore said:
Such a thing does not exist. Convincing yourself that new = reliable is a great way to get burned.

Here is a bathtub curve:

http://www.cable360.net/images/articles/33190_1230149105.gif

The chances of death due to infant mortality are high, add (or multiply, as the case may be) on top of that the fact that it's all in RAID 0, and (statistically) the data is safer scrawled onto a piece of notebook paper.

If it's still running in a year or so then it may have proved itself reliable, but right now, these numbers make my gonads retract.

It's not that bad. Really the failure rate is reliant on the hard drives failure rates multiplied by the number of drives. It's not like running the raid increases the probability of the hard drives failure rate, it just increases the failure rate of the raids integrity.

pik4chu · Jan 12, 2010

ThePerfectCore said:
Such a thing does not exist. Convincing yourself that new = reliable is a great way to get burned.

Here is a bathtub curve:

http://www.cable360.net/images/articles/33190_1230149105.gif

The chances of death due to infant mortality are high, add (or multiply, as the case may be) on top of that the fact that it's all in RAID 0, and (statistically) the data is safer scrawled onto a piece of notebook paper.

If it's still running in a year or so then it may have proved itself reliable, but right now, these numbers make my gonads retract.

I dont have to convince myself of anything. Im not talking out of my *** or something like that. Ive had a RAID 0 in my main rig, from the same set of drives, for 3 years now. no failure. period. In fact I havent had a hard drive die in several years now so yes I would call that "new, more reliable hard drives"

Martel · Jan 12, 2010

Look at it this way, I have a feeling that the old drives were not up to par. I don't know yet, but as soon as I get a chance I will see what the smart sector says. If it does show a large number of errors on 1 of the drives, then the new ones are more reliable than the old ones. If no large amount of errors are showing, then maybe I didn't get more reliable drives, maybe I just got faster ones. Either way it makes me smile.

Raid advice.

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