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A few questions about raid10 limitations and such

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Rogue505

Registered
Joined
Sep 11, 2006
Hi,

First a bit of background, but if you aren't interested, then my questions are further below ;). I use an intel 320 SSD for system. I use an 1TB Caviar Black for "everything else". All my important data is constantly backed up to another computer in my network via an utility similar to Apple's time machine.

I would like to accomplish several things:
- more space for "everything else"
- more speed (mostly sequential reads/writes) for "everything else"
- better redundancy for "everything else"

So I was thinking about building a raid10 array with my P67A-UD5-B3. What I am wondering about is this:
- What are size limitations when it comes to the onboard controller's raid10? Is the maximum size of each individual drive in any way limited? Is the maximum size of "available space" in any way limited? Can you, for example, throw in four 3TB drives and have 6TB available? On Google I noticed people talking about a 2TB limit, but I'm not sure what it applies to - size of an individual drive or total available space or simply a partition in that available space ... I'm very confused here.

- I was thinking of getting 4x 1TB WD RE4 drives for the array, although I'm not sure if it will be enough to last me several year space-wise :S But if we forget about the size for a moment, are these RE4 drives a good/ok/bad idea?

Thanks for any advice, maybe sharing your own experience with RAID etc. :salute:
 
Last edited:
Hi,

First a bit of background, but if you aren't interested, then my questions are further below ;). I use an intel 320 SSD for system. I use an 1TB Caviar Black for "everything else". All my important data is constantly backed up to another computer in my network via an utility similar to Apple's time machine.

I would like to accomplish several things:
- more space for "everything else"
- more speed (mostly sequential reads/writes) for "everything else"
- better redundancy for "everything else"

RAID isn't a backup, you're still going to need to copy to another PC to have good redundancy, and then use offsite backup for great redundancy. If your PSU blows you can have any level of RAID and it'll go bye-bye

Rogue505 said:
So I was thinking about building a raid10 array with my P67A-UD5-B3. What I am wondering about is this:
- What are size limitations when it comes to the onboard controller's raid10?
No size limitation to onboard RAID afaik

Rogue505 said:
Is the maximum size of each individual drive in any way limited?
Since that's a newer 6Gb sata board I wouldn't think you'd have problems with particular sizes, up to and including 3tb

Rogue505 said:
Is the maximum size of "available space" in any way limited? Can you, for example, throw in four 3TB drives and have 6TB available? On Google I noticed people talking about a 2TB limit, but I'm not sure what it applies to - size of an individual drive or total available space or simply a partition in that available space ... I'm very confused here.

Just format the partition GPT and you won't have the 2tb issue.

Rogue505 said:
- I was thinking of getting 4x 1TB WD RE4 drives for the array, although I'm not sure if it will be enough to last me several year space-wise :S But if we forget about the size for a moment, are these RE4 drives a good/ok/bad idea?

Server class drives, and you get what you pay for. That said, you could probably find alot cheaper drives and build two arrays for redundancy, instead of going with RE4 drives.

Rogue505 said:
Thanks for any advice, maybe sharing your own experience with RAID etc. :salute:

Anything I have with RAID is used for file sharing, so I don't need the speed of RAID10; I also don't like losing 50% of my drive space for redundancy. I run RAID6, have run Linux software raid for years and just recently purchased an areca card for hardware raid - RAID6.

Onboard is fine for RAID 0, 1, 10, but it's going to be slower for RAID levels with parity, like 5 and 6 (as the most popular home storage RAID levels)
 
Thanks a lot for your input. It helped me make some considerations. All my important data is backed up on another server running raid1 and all critical data is in addition synced with my laptop and online storage. Therefore if something happened to my "everything else" it would be a bummer but I'd live with it. Still, It'd be nice to have some backup and avoid rebuilding everything from scratch. After all - as I understand it - you can still lose everything with RAID10 when 2 drives fail, if they are the correct ones (I wouldn't count on my luck there, lol :)).
So ... Since sequential read speeds are pretty much the most important thing to me, I was thinking about buying 3 drives instead of 4 and putting them in a RAID5 array. With the money left I would buy an external WD Green with the same capacity as the RAID array and then connect it once a week and make a backup of everything. That way I get more speed in the area that I need and a backup at the same time. If the worst happens I'll only lose a week's worth of data that isn't that important anyway. Yeah, maybe this is a better solution for the same price ...
 
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