What would be the goal from your raid setup?
Are you looking for more speed or data redundancy?
If you post back your budget and goals we may be able to get you pointed in the right direction.
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Reply to outlw6669
Also, do you have external drives that you use for backup? If not, and if your data is important to you then your data will be safer if you use the extra drives for backup rather than RAID.
Also, do you have external drives that you use for backup? If not, and if your data is important to you then your data will be safer if you use the extra drives for backup rather than RAID.
I Have two external drives one for backup of essential files and one for music both are backed up regularly and I want to have more speed and data redundancy. MY budget is close to $700
With your budget, RAID 5 will provide both data redundancy and additional speed but requires 3 drives at a minimum. RAID 0+1/10 will also provide both, arguably with a little more of each, but 4 drives minimum and I don't believe you can add drives to increase capacity. Also not many motherboards support RAID 10/0+1.
hit up wikipedia to find out pros and cons of each.
Message edited by bliq on 10-13-2009 at 02:18:06 AM
You didn't say what your capacity needs are. If they're small, an SSD will be faster than RAID for most cases (with the exception of writing large files).
If your capacity needs are moderate, a RAID 1 set of Velociraptors will likely work well.
If your capacity needs are larger, then perhaps four 1TB drives in a RAID 0+1 configuration would be a good choice.
Be aware that RAID 5 has very poor write performance, so it's not a good choice if you expect to be doing things that write a lot of data to the RAID set.