OS SSD and HDD storage array

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
J

JackYaz

Reputable
May 27, 2014
14
0
4,510
Hi there,

I'm looking into building a machine predominately to be used for gaming, but it will also be acting as a file server until I can stump up the cash for a NAS. What I can't decide, is the setup I should be using. The board is going to be a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 .

The OS will be installed on a Seagate 480Gb SSD (I already own this)

I then want at least 4TB of storage to be used for holding games, movies and tv shows etc.

I can't decide which of the following is the best approach, so looking for someone with more knowledge than I on the subject!

1) 2TB drive for games/documents etc. and 4 drives in RAID(1,5,10?) for videos.
2) all 5 drives in a raid array.

Any input is much appreciated!

Jack
 
Solution
drtweak
Correct. The main SATA Chipset (It isn't labled but i'm assuming its the black ports since there are 6 of them) Support RAID 0 1 5 10. The Marvel or Grey ones only support 0 and 1.

Me Im a big fan of RAID 10. I recently added 4 1TB SAS Drives to a clients server (Which is still only running SATA 3.0 Gbps) On their Dell PERC 6 Card which does Raid 0 1 5 and 10. orginally we had 3 drives in a raid 5. Not sure why but was only getting like 25-50 MB/s on it. Then we got another, I made it a RAID 10 and BAM! Was getting almost 400MB/s on that sucker! Between that, and upgrading the CPU and Adding a second Xeon in there And Teaming the Dual Gigabit NIC cards their server ended up being like 4 times faster for their networking applications...
Sort by date Sort by votes
drtweak

drtweak

Illustrious
Sep 17, 2012
6,342
75
38,640
Same boat as you. To make life for me easier i kepts my Music/Games/Doc seperate from my Videos. I have a Raid 0 of 2 2TB drives with a Single 4TB as a backup drive. Then i have a 2TB for everything else and a Crucial M500 240 GB as my OS drive and a 640 GB as my Game Install drive. I plan on making a small NAS as well. I use a Dell PERC 5 RAID card. I plan on getting a little embedded Motherboard back with a Dual Core Celeron, small case to toss a 2x5.25 to a 3x3.5 enclosure in it and then toss those 3 hard drives in it so that i can keep it on all the time and have it general very little heat as my current PC generates a LOT of heat. I steam using windows media center to my XBox all the time so i need to have Windows 7 installed and not some NAS OS.

But to answer your quesion I'd keep the Game/Docs seperate fro the videos. Makes things easier. Espically if your like me and anal about defragging haha. Also remember a RAID is NOT A BACKUP! ITs only a failsafe! Now to get Maxium space you will want to run a Raid 5. To get maxamum performance and better redundancy go RAID 10. With a RAID 10 though you will only have access to 50% of all combined drives. with RAID 5 its N-1 or only one drive loss of space.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
J

JackYaz

Reputable
May 27, 2014
14
0
4,510


I'd be using the NAS as pure file serving, I use XBMC on my HTPC and Raspbmc on a couple of Pi's around the house, so any OS on as NAS is fine by me, as long as it supports NFS!

I had been leaning towards RAID 10, as a friend advised me against RAID 5 in such a small set of drives. I've begun to lean towards 4x4TB WD Red in RAID 10, to hold all my media that would eventually be streamed by a NAS, and a 4TB WD Black as my games, documents etc. I have various external USB drives to serve as backups, I just wanted RAID as an extra layer of comfort, lost one too many drives over the years!

As far as I understand, I can set up the RAID array on my board?

Jack
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
drtweak

drtweak

Illustrious
Sep 17, 2012
6,342
75
38,640
Correct. The main SATA Chipset (It isn't labled but i'm assuming its the black ports since there are 6 of them) Support RAID 0 1 5 10. The Marvel or Grey ones only support 0 and 1.

Me Im a big fan of RAID 10. I recently added 4 1TB SAS Drives to a clients server (Which is still only running SATA 3.0 Gbps) On their Dell PERC 6 Card which does Raid 0 1 5 and 10. orginally we had 3 drives in a raid 5. Not sure why but was only getting like 25-50 MB/s on it. Then we got another, I made it a RAID 10 and BAM! Was getting almost 400MB/s on that sucker! Between that, and upgrading the CPU and Adding a second Xeon in there And Teaming the Dual Gigabit NIC cards their server ended up being like 4 times faster for their networking applications!

RAID 10 has the best of both worlds on Read and Write. AND as long as two drives in the same mirror don't fail you can have one drive fail in each mirror and still be fine. Raid 10 is one of the only raids that can handle more than a 2 Drive failure.

But yea I'd still just do a RAID 10 with 4 drives and then use the other for your other stuff.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
popatim

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Dec 2, 2009
38,904
980
135,890
I would separate your Nas-files Drives from your games drive just to make it easy to move the NAS drives to the NAS without effecting your gaming pc.

ie: one SSD for Boot. One HDD for games & programs, 4 HDD in raid10 for Nas/shared/media files.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom