Need help with RAID on my Workstation.

[Nechen]

My work has changed so I'm going to be using the following rig as a workstation:

Intel Core2Duo E6400 OC'd @ 2.6GHz
4GB DDR2-800 Corsair XMS
MSI P6N-SLi 650i Motherboard

I suppose my question is rather straightforward but after spending a couple of hours on Newegg all the RAID controllers/cards I found had absolutely abysmal reviews that I found rather shocking across the board. All cards, regardless of the brand, seemed the suffer from the same issues. IE the HDDs became corrupted, RAID0 ceased to function, ETC...

ALL I need for this station is STABLE RAID1/Mirror with (2) 1TB Hard Drives. I need absolute stability so I'm hoping my fellow OCF'ers can throw some options my way so here are my questions:

1.) What Hard Drive brand do you guys recommend? I used to <3 Western Digital but I've had the same stupid 250GB AAKS Hard Drive fail on me three times now.

2.) Can I get away with buying a "cheap" RAID card for $80~ or do you either spend big or go home when it comes to true RAID cards?

Having failed at 2.), can anyone here speak to how the older Nvidia chipsets handled RAID? I couldn't care less about performance but I want to make sure I don't boot up one morning to find a nice flashing "REBUILD" on my POST if that makes any sense.

 

[Realee]

First up - why do you need RAID? RAID introduces extra points of failure which increases the chance of data loss.

RAID1 gives you a single mirror - this does not increase read/write speed and is not a backup.

If you were REALLY going to look at a RAID you'd need more drives and do a RAID5 (At least) so you can have a drive failure without data loss.



On recommending drives - consensus was Hitachi which were recently bought out by WD so it remains to be seen if the quality is going to stick around.

On RAID Cards - Dell Perc5i (With a slight mod to make it work in non-server boards - readily available online - it's just nail polish) or the IBM M1015 RAID Card if your motherboard RAID won't suffice.

 

[Trivius]

I don’t understand that assertion, how exactly is RAID1, not a backup?

Regardless, if all you need is a RAID1, have you considered one of those WD 1TB(>) MyBook Studio II or Live Duo Personal Clouds?

Also, at present I use a Sans Digitial 5-bay TowerRAID, with 4-500MB WD RE4 in RAID10 in eSATA to its included RocketRAID PCIE as my primary drive. I have had no drive issues, although they are not as fast as they should be.

 

[Realee]

I don’t understand that assertion, how exactly is RAID1, not a backup?

Regardless, if all you need is a RAID1, have you considered one of those WD 1TB(>) MyBook Studio II or Live Duo Personal Clouds?

Also, at present I use a Sans Digitial 5-bay TowerRAID, with 4-500MB WD RE4 in RAID10 in eSATA to its included RocketRAID PCIE as my primary drive. I have had no drive issues, although they are not as fast as they should be.

RAID1 will mirror EVERYTHING that gets sent to the drive. This means if the PC gets a virus which wipes out all files it gets mirrored to the 2nd drive and you're left staring at nothing.

If a file ends up corrupt for any reason - it gets mirrored and it's useless.

 

[txus.palacios]

Read the Storage Sticky by thideras.

RAID 1 is only a "HDD disaster" backup. If you need file A and drive A dies, you can copy it from drive B. If you need file B and you've deleted it from drive A, drive B is a mirror copy of drive A thus file B does not exist on drive B.

My work has changed so I'm going to be using the following rig as a workstation:

Intel Core2Duo E6400 OC'd @ 2.6GHz
4GB DDR2-800 Corsair XMS
MSI P6N-SLi 650i Motherboard

I suppose my question is rather straightforward but after spending a couple of hours on Newegg all the RAID controllers/cards I found had absolutely abysmal reviews that I found rather shocking across the board. All cards, regardless of the brand, seemed the suffer from the same issues. IE the HDDs became corrupted, RAID0 ceased to function, ETC...

ALL I need for this station is STABLE RAID1/Mirror with (2) 1TB Hard Drives. I need absolute stability so I'm hoping my fellow OCF'ers can throw some options my way so here are my questions:

1.) What Hard Drive brand do you guys recommend? I used to <3 Western Digital but I've had the same stupid 250GB AAKS Hard Drive fail on me three times now.

2.) Can I get away with buying a "cheap" RAID card for $80~ or do you either spend big or go home when it comes to true RAID cards?

Having failed at 2.), can anyone here speak to how the older Nvidia chipsets handled RAID? I couldn't care less about performance but I want to make sure I don't boot up one morning to find a nice flashing "REBUILD" on my POST if that makes any sense.

If they're critical storage, go RE4 / Constellation. For a cheap $80 RAID card, get a PERC 5i, nail polish it, but get a beefier heatsink. The card requires 100LFM IIRC with stock heatsink so it will be hard to set that passively.

Have you considered building a file server? You only need a motherboard with a lot of SATA ports from the chipset (avoid Marvell, JMicron and that jazz) and to install OpenIndiana. ZFS is arguably the best software RAID solution out there. And IMHO, it's better than the expensive RAID Controllers.

 

[Nechen]

Cool thanks for the advice guys.

I just need RAID1 because this workstation won't be THAT critical. I've already had a 250GB RAID1 array fail and I was still able to get into the Debian OS and pull the files off I needed so I've been through that before.

So go with PERC for a RAID card? I'm debating whether the old-*** 650i Chipset's RAID will be good enough. I don't really care about performance like I said.

 

[shadowdr]

The older Nvidia raid cards were pretty darn good as far as not losing a drive so that it needed rebuilding. The Silicon image based cards were also very good in that respect, neither were extremly fast soloutions but were rock solid for data. I used both since the socket a KT7Araid mobo came out. I always used the raid0 option so I did in fact lose data one time due to a drive failure but never due to the card or chipset itself. Intel based raid was always faster but did suffer the dropped drive from the array and rebuilding would lose all the data if it were a raid0 array. I also ran an Acard array for years without incident but it was an IDE card and not sata. I think that you would be fine with any cheap card that is not intel based and uses Nv or SI raid.

 

[Automata]

I would stick with Hitachi if you are going with a hardware RAID controller. If the system is running Windows 7, you could run software RAID 1, which would probably be a better and cheaper solution. A PERC 5/i would be a cheap entry card, but I would suggest getting a IBM M1015 instead. Unless you need near-100% uptime, I would suggest going with full system backups instead. It will be longer to restore from if you have catastrophic data loss, but it is easier and cheaper to setup and maintain.

I don’t understand that assertion, how exactly is RAID1, not a backup?

As I stated in the storage sticky:

"RAID is not a backup":.
A common misunderstanding is that RAID is a form a backup; this is completely false. RAID is designed to prevent data loss when a hard drive fails. A backup is a "snapshot" of data from a specific point in time and it can be restored if something was deleted or lost. If data on a RAID array is updated, overwritten, or deleted, the changes immediately propagate to all the hard drives. By the time you realize the data is gone, it is too late; there is no way to pull the old version. However, you can use backups and RAID in tandem to create a more resilient backup, since it will be guarded against hard drives failures. It is important to know the difference between RAID and backups.