to raid or not to raid

[dt]

ok, so my config is

q6600 3.2 ghz
nvidia 8800gts 640mb
4x1GB ram
4x 320GB sg HDD's
4x 500GB sg HDD's
2x sata dvd burners

one of my 500GB hdd's don't work at the moment and i am waiting on seagate to send me another

Now my question is what should i do? I have all sorts of files including movies,software,pictures,games etc... I can only use a maximum of 6 hard drives since my pc only gives me 8 sata connectors and two are allocated to my sata dvd burners.

I was thinking about raid 10 with 4x 500gb HDDs and raid 0 with 2x 320GB hdds but im not sure if i really need raid for this purpose.

 

[chjade84]

First thing's first... holy crap that's a lot of drives! Why so many small ones instead of larger ones?

RAID is nice and fun for two activities:

-Reading/writing data faster
-Preparing for one or more of your hard drives to die

With that many (Seagate) hard drives there's a good chance one will die. So put all your media on a redundant RAID (1 or 5 or 6 or 10). This way when one inevitably dies you can just replace it keeping all your media intact. Just remember...

RAID is like giving your hard drives an extra life. It (a single hard drive) can die once and still work; replace the dead one and you have another extra life. It is not a backup solution for many reasons, so don't think of it that way - if you were.

For your operating system, on the other hand, use a RAID 0 as it will increase performance of reads/writes. You will have a slightly faster system overall. However...

Make a back up image (Acronis, Norton Ghost, etc.) once you have it all set up because when one of those hard drives dies you will loose everything on the RAID 0.

Don't use more than 2 hard drives for a RAID 0 because it just increases the chance to loose everything and you don't need much space for the OS anyway.

Personally, If it is an option I would:
Get a 60-ish GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM for the OS and forget about RAID for that, it will be faster.
Get 4 500GB drives in a RAID 5 for media.

Fewer drives = less chance for one to fail.

Just read a lot about RAID and you will be able to make your own choices. It's really up to you. Personally I've never had a hard drive fail. And I've had quite a few. Perhaps I'm just lucky that way.

 

[dt]

I haven't had a drive fail in raid at all and i have been using raid for a long time. Its just that i don't really know what to do to make good use of my hard drives.

ok so since i dont really want to buy anymore hard drives i should just...? :

2x 320GB hdds in raid 0
4x500GB hdds in raid 5

where do i put my backup images? on the raid 5?

 

[drjakj]

help?

 

[drjakj]

... any help at all? bump...