Raid 1 w/2 Disks vs. Raid 5 w/3 Disks vs. Raid 10 w/4 Disks

[Jettatore]

I need a backup solution, I'll be using the following motherboard and disks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131025
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140

In Raid 1 w/2 Disks. It's easy to fix. No performance boost. Perfectly content with this as a pure backup solution.

In Raid 5 w/3 Disks. It's a little more tricky but I'd be perfectly fine backing up my stuff and starting over, once the disk is replaced, if the Raid cannot be rebuilt after failure. That is, if there is a good performance incentive for both the added trickiness as well as the cost of a 3rd HDD ($90).

In Raid 10 w/4 Disks. It seems simple enough but now there's two extra HDD's to buy. Again here the only reason I'd do this is for nice a performance boost over Raid 5.

My uses will primarily be 3D Modeling/Animation, Photoshop and some casual gaming. So, Performance boost wise, what am I looking at between these three scenarios. Thank you very much in advance -Derek

 

[millebi]

Well now that's a hard question to answer given that you didn't say why you're doing RAID as a backup solution.

If you're attempting to save money, but still want the highest performance you'd probably want to look into RAID 2 with 15,000 RPM drives (2 15K drives should still be cheaper than 4 7.2K). This means you need a good MB, and a smaller case is OK. Based on what you've said you may not need the performance difference you'd get this way anyway unless you've already noticed your processor isn't maxed out and it's waiting on the disk for a lot of it's time.

If you want to save money but don't really care about the performance then RAID 2 is still cheapest.

If money is no object and performance is the highest requirement then RAID 10 is your solution. This means you need a case that will hold 4 drives with adequate cooling (fans) and you still probably want to look at 10,000 RPM or 15,000 RPM drives.

The biggest question in my mind is : What is the thing you're attempting to save yourself from?

If you're worried about a drive crashing in the middle of a 3 day render then you're on the right track.

If you're only worried about a drive crashing and taking your data with it (but not while you're using it), you can backup to any other hard drive (scheduled task in Windows doing a copy) for less configuration pains than configuring a RAID array.

If you're worried about a drive crash and a timed backup is impossible (many many many many gigabytes) then you're back to RAID and lots of money.

So to sum up my comments:
1. If you know your hard disk is your performance problem then RAID can help you.
2. If you want to spend the money on faster highly available disk then RAID is what you want.
3. If you are only interested in doing fast backups, RAID is not the cheapest way to go and can have a performance impact if you choose the wrong one.
4. You need to answer the following questions of your needs to ensure a proper fit:
a)Why am I backing up the data? (Drive crash, or 3 day render loss can't be allowed. Remembering that a UPS can be really cheap)
b)Do I need a speed improvement on disk access (Yes = RAID Striping or really fast drive, No = RAID mirroring)
c)Is a faster drive the solution to the problem? (7,200 RPM vs 10,000 RPM vs 15,000 RPM)


Bill

 

[dt]

I need a backup solution, I'll be using the following motherboard and disks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131025
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140

In Raid 1 w/2 Disks. It's easy to fix. No performance boost. Perfectly content with this as a pure backup solution.

In Raid 5 w/3 Disks. It's a little more tricky but I'd be perfectly fine backing up my stuff and starting over, once the disk is replaced, if the Raid cannot be rebuilt after failure. That is, if there is a good performance incentive for both the added trickiness as well as the cost of a 3rd HDD ($90).

In Raid 10 w/4 Disks. It seems simple enough but now there's two extra HDD's to buy. Again here the only reason I'd do this is for nice a performance boost over Raid 5.

My uses will primarily be 3D Modeling/Animation, Photoshop and some casual gaming. So, Performance boost wise, what am I looking at between these three scenarios. Thank you very much in advance -Derek

i would use raid 10. basically its raid 1 with the performance of raid 0

 

[jaguarskx]

I would just go with a RAID 1 array with 2 drives.

The way I see it, the more drives in the array, the higher the chances you will experience some sort of failure.