RAID 0, 1, 0+1 or 5?

[frango9000]

Well im a noob in raid but as i have seen for gaming RAID 0 is the most used but as i have heard if 1 drive fails all fail... so raid 1 could be the answer right? except that it eats double of the HD space.. so mmm i actually got 4 250 WD KS drives. and i read in wiki that RAID 0+1 has the spped of raid 0 and the security of raid 1 but it also consumes doble space, but i really dont need 1tb SO... What you ppl recomend me to do?

I have also heard of RAID 5 but couldnt understand it... (thats not saying much cause i barely undestand woman, math, the world, etc...)

So back to the point, What should i use For lots of PC Usage basicly in gaming ...

 

[DDay629]

Why use raid at all? Are you doing video editing or anything that needs the space of 500 GB's in one "HD"? If not, just don't do raid. All your games and programs will EASILY fit on one of those WD's, and if you want, you should get a Raptor for those and use the others for other stuff. I don't know what, I guess something like the entire collection of internet pr0n.

DDay

 

[p8ntslinger676]

0+1 is the best way to go thats what i would do if i had four drives. or sell two and buy two raptors and put them in a raid 0 for your os and programs, maybe two 36gb ones, cheap as a 74 gb raptor but you get the speed for start up of programs and os. are you going to be putting that many programs on your computer other than the os???

 

[vimka]

RAID-5 is the best combination of speed/security.

The way it works, in a nutshell, is by storing parity data across all drives. Drive A is stored on B, C, and D. Drive B is stored on A, C, and D. Thus if one drive fails, you can replace the drive and rebuild the array from the parity data. This does, however, consume 1 drive worth of space and speed.

So essentially, with 4 HDDs in RAID-5 you would get 3x space and 3x speed. You also do not have to worry about data loss, unless more than one drive fails.

 

[stuart]

Correct. Raid 5 rocks if you have 3 or more drives. Since you have 4 250's You will get the security of single drive failure recovery, High read speeds and 750 gigs of space.

 

[AshyN]

Learn to answer straight rahter than questioning the person who has a doubt.

 

[DDay629]

Huh? Why should I not provide a person with a option that is often times not considered because it isn't "cool" enough. People think they need raid when most of the time they don't. So don't go all high and mighty on me.

DDay

 

[frango9000]

Dudes, don't fight over a stupid matter i think we all can spend this time and energy playing som game nice like battlefield 2 or oblivion.

Well now im deciding between raid 1+0 wich is my 1st option raid 5 2nd and no raid 3,

Can any1 coment out on experiences with both raid? pros and cons, etc???

 

[DDay629]

I greatly appologize for arguing in your thread. If you have the HDD's, which you do, go raid 5 if you absolutely must. Also, if your mobo supports it.

It might have a bit of a learning curve, but w/e.

Also, I very much like the idea of playing some BF2. See you guys all in Gulf of Oman.



DDay

 

[frango9000]

I greatly appologize for arguing in your thread. If you have the HDD's, which you do, go raid 5 if you absolutely must. Also, if your mobo supports it.

It might have a bit of a learning curve, but w/e.

Also, I very much like the idea of playing some BF2. See you guys all in Gulf of Oman.



DDay

Id rather make a hole in your head in Karkand Yeah, offtopic but well let me say that you guy have been of allot of help (and i have just been in the forum for 1 day =D Thanks allot

 

[DDay629]

I look forward to seeing you at the end of my scope, or perhaps at the tip of my knife.

Yeah, really, stick around, we can always do with some new people. And you can sure learn a lot in a very short amount of time. Also, let me know what those 2ms monitors are like. I can't imagine how fast that is!

DDay

By the way, whats the internet like down there. Cause I couldn't imagine playing BF2 without a fairly good stable internet connection. I imagine it isn't fast enough to connect to north american or european servers without a bit of lag, right?

 

[doolittle]

Can any1 coment out on experiences with both raid? pros and cons, etc???

Sure.

Raid "0" is the fastest since data is "striped" sequentially among all the disks in the set, but a single disk failure causes volume failure so it is high risk traded for high speed.

Raid "0+1" is a mirror of 2 stripe pairs, a single drive failure will take out one stripe. A second drive failure has a 66% chance of taking out the other stripe rendering a volume failure. This is because the remaining stripe has to maintain 2 or more disks, and of the remaning drives only one is part of the failed stripe and two are part of the redundant stripe. The volume size is [(# of disks) / 2]. Speed is unaffected by a single drive failure.

Raid "10" (similiar to "0+1") is a stripe of 2 mirror pairs, so a single drive failure will take out one mirror pair. The second drive failure has a 33% chance of rendering a volume failure. This is because the mirror pairs only need one disk from each set to maintain the stripe, and the only disk to fail that will cause volume failure is the other disk in the failed mirror set. The volume size is [(# of disks) / 2]. Speed is unaffected by a single drive failure.

Raid "5" maximizes your redundant storage capacity since it only uses 1 disk's worth of data to caclulate parity information for the volume, so the total size is [(# of disks) - 1] compared to 50% for mirror/stripe. Anything over 1 disk lost causes a volume failure, and a failed disk reduces performance since data from the failed disk has to be recovered from parity calculations.

I have only used mirror/stripe for database servers and raid 5 for fileservers.

Hope this helps, sorry if I confused more...

 

[apache_lives]

Raid0 = Danger???? Not Really concidering if you have one drive and it dies, you loose your data which is pretty much the same as raid0 - loose a drive and you still loose data, but yeah - twice the physical drives can equal twice the danger, BUT i have 2x80gb seagates and theyve been goin at it for years without issues, on the other hand my file server uses 2x250gb WD's in raid1 cause im paranoid yet the moral of the story is backup your data - cause even with raid1 a virus could destroy all my data.

google em for information, and what we need is a servey of what setups people use and what ones let them down etc.

Well im a noob in raid but as i have seen for gaming RAID 0 is the most used but as i have heard if 1 drive fails all fail... so raid 1 could be the answer right? except that it eats double of the HD space.. so mmm i actually got 4 250 WD KS drives. and i read in wiki that RAID 0+1 has the spped of raid 0 and the security of raid 1 but it also consumes doble space, but i really dont need 1tb SO... What you ppl recomend me to do?

I have also heard of RAID 5 but couldnt understand it... (thats not saying much cause i barely undestand woman, math, the world, etc...)

So back to the point, What should i use For lots of PC Usage basicly in gaming ...

 

[AshyN]

The main reason for RAID was to enhance the capacity but with data safety. Now depending upon different RAID configurations, there are lots of pros and cons. If you ask my personnel openion, I would say. I really dont care about data when it comes to speed, because I will be wise enough to Backup my imp data on a separate HDD and I will definitely go for RAID 0.

Pros and Cons
-RAID 0 -
CON - Loss of data if any of the HDD fail
PROS-Faster data rate.

-RAID 1 -
CON - You get only 50% of the capacity
PROS - Your data is same if even a single HDD is alive.

- RAID 5 -
PROS - Even if 1 HDD fails the data is Safe
You get faster data rate
CON - If more than 1 HDD fails, the Data is lost.

I hope I am not confusing here.. but I've tried to make it as simple as possible
You get more storage capacity compared to RAID 1, but still lesser than RAID 0, because of parity for redundancy.

 

[AshyN]

Since you have 4 HDDs, and you dont really need 1 TB of space.

I would recommend,

Make 1 RAID 0 with 2 HDDs (This is for gaming and OS),

And keep the 3rd HDD to keep other imp data for which you dont need speed but safety is important like MP3 and Other personnel files.

Keep the 4th HDD to backup this RAID 0 volume and Other imp files.

 

[halcyon]

Well im a noob in raid but as i have seen for gaming RAID 0 is the most used but as i have heard if 1 drive fails all fail... so raid 1 could be the answer right? except that it eats double of the HD space.. so mmm i actually got 4 250 WD KS drives. and i read in wiki that RAID 0+1 has the spped of raid 0 and the security of raid 1 but it also consumes doble space, but i really dont need 1tb SO... What you ppl recomend me to do?

I have also heard of RAID 5 but couldnt understand it... (thats not saying much cause i barely undestand woman, math, the world, etc...)

So back to the point, What should i use For lots of PC Usage basicly in gaming ...

To simplify it, RAID 5 requires at least 3 disks, gives the benefit of RAID 0, but adds parity (or a hot backup disk) should one disk fail. Should one disk fail the array can be rebuilt "hot" once the failed disk is replaced.

...RAID 5 and 0+1 seem like overkill for gaming unless you're just trying to toy with the technology.

 

[vimka]

Dudes, don't fight over a stupid matter i think we all can spend this time and energy playing som game nice like battlefield 2 or oblivion.

Well now im deciding between raid 1+0 wich is my 1st option raid 5 2nd and no raid 3,

Can any1 coment out on experiences with both raid? pros and cons, etc???

I ran RAID-0 for about 2 years and had a number of issues with it. Most of them, however, were caused by poor drivers for Windows 2000. Once I switched to XP, I only had some minor troubles. Recently, however (on the night of a LAN party actually), one of my HDDs died. I lost all the data on the RAID (none of which was irreplaceable), and the physical problems with the drive corrupted Windows when I tried to boot with it plugged in. It was really nasty. However, it would have gone down the same way if I'd had it as a single drive - I just would have lost less data.

The speed, however, was very nice. When gaming, I would load levels about 40% faster than anyone else I was playing with (even those who had much faster machines than I do). I also used the RAID for disc-images, so installing with Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools went super quick.

I actually like RAID quite a bit, in spite of it's inherrent problems. I'm planning to do RAID-0 on my next machine, with 2x 74GB Raptors (or possibly the 150GB if I can afford them). It's really nice to see Windows load in literally a few seconds.

I have not used RAID-5, but I have done a lot of reading on it and it seems to be the best choice for your situation. You get 3x the speed (which, believe me, is awesome) at the cost of 1 drive worth of space. You also get the data security, so if one drive fails you are still OK.

RAID-1 I have only used for servers and paranoid customers. It offers no performance advantage, but if one drive fails you are far less likely to lose data. It's nice for business enviornments and that is about it.

 

[AshyN]

Ah Good way to explain...

 

[clue69less]

RAID-5 is the best combination of speed/security.

The way it works, in a nutshell, is by storing parity data across all drives. Drive A is stored on B, C, and D. Drive B is stored on A, C, and D. Thus if one drive fails, you can replace the drive and rebuild the array from the parity data. This does, however, consume 1 drive worth of space and speed.

So essentially, with 4 HDDs in RAID-5 you would get 3x space and 3x speed. You also do not have to worry about data loss, unless more than one drive fails.

If you go with RAID5 and your HDs are new and unused, see if you can trade them in for the WD HDs that are of the YD breed. The YD drives have advantages for RAID setups. See WDs web site for details.

 

[AshyN]

Trade them off for a SCSI instead.. a single SCSI is faster than a SATA RAID and much more reliable and faullt tolerant, and you can use 24/7 265 days too.. non stop. 8O

 

[frango9000]

Well thank everyone for their help. i think im going on RAID 5 because i got speed and security, and i only loose 1 drive of space, i actualñly cant change the drives, because if i sold them i had to go to the US and buy some new ones and thats not happening until thanksgiving (maybe later)

 

[michaelahess]

I have raid 5 on three machines, one with 3x scsi 18gb 10k rpm 160 drives, one on 4x 320gb wd sata drives with a pci-e raid controller highpoint 2320 and one on 4 various ide 80gb drives. They are all faster than arrays in my other machines (all raid1's) except my dual samsung sp2504's in a raid0 which is almost as fast as my buddies dual raptors in raid0 (I actually get a higher burst speed.)

I'd stick with raid0 on two drives as it will be faster than a raid5 on 4 drives overall (raid5 is quick to access but slower to write). And set the other two up as data and backup as previously mentioned.

Most servers I build for example have dual raid 1's or 1 raid1 and 1 raid0 with a 5th hd for ghost images of the boot drive. And any graphics workstations I build use raid0 exclusively with nas storage since it gets the last bit of speed out.

 

[clue69less]

Trade them off for a SCSI instead.. a single SCSI is faster than a SATA RAID and much more reliable and faullt tolerant, and you can use 24/7 265 days too.. non stop. 8O

And if he gets the same capacity using SCSI drives, not only will he have to buy a controller card but he'll be buying some expensive drives. Is that gonna fit into the budget?

 

[frango9000]

Trade them off for a SCSI instead.. a single SCSI is faster than a SATA RAID and much more reliable and faullt tolerant, and you can use 24/7 265 days too.. non stop. 8O

And if he gets the same capacity using SCSI drives, not only will he have to buy a controller card but he'll be buying some expensive drives. Is that gonna fit into the budget?

I think i could but im not sure if scsi is for me (i just want to play, play great ofcoarse but wouldnt scsi overkill it?

 

[AshyN]

With reference to whatever you've mentioned, its clear you are not looking for capacity here.

Its just the plain power and speed together with reliability and data safety.

Now consider this.
You can trade your 4 HDDs with 1 SCSI HDD. Its wont overkill your budget / Requirement I am sure.

However, it will save you from hassles of setting up RAID as well as Save power - Lot of power.

And there is no match for SCSI reliability, you dont even need raid if its for a PC / workstation, but performance will be better than 4 SATA HDD RAID 0.