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[Solved] RAID options using WD500GB Black

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Best answer from geofelt.

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dgre005   11-14-2009 at 01:46:14 AM


I'm building a system using an ICH10R-based motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR) and I already have a 500GB WD Black SATA drive...

I was thinking of buying another, identical drive for a RAID configuration. I can choose between RAID 0,1, 5 and 10. I think RAID 0
would be out of the question because I wouldn't want to stay worrying about reliability and I'm not that obsessed with speed
either. So what would be the best choice out of the remainder if I were to use just 2 drives? 1 seems to be the simplest option...

PS I'm planning on using a dual-boot set-up (Win XP and Vista Ultimate), mainly for gaming and the usual day-to-day computing.

Never used RAID before, so thanks for any input!

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Best answer from geofelt
If you have to post the question, then you don't need raid of any type.
I know; smartass remark, but no offense intended.

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki- [...] iveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 for protecting data is that you can recover from a hard drive failure quickly.
It is for servers that can't afford any down time.
Recovery from a hard drive failure is just moments.
Fortunately hard drives do not fail often.
Mean time to failure is claimed to be on the order of 1,000,000 hours.(100 years)
Raid-1 does not protect you from other types of losses such as viruses,
software errors,raid controller failure, operator error, or fire...etc.
For that, you need EXTERNAL backup.
If you have external backup, and can afford some recovery time, then you don't need raid-1.

Consider the merits of concentrating on a simple single windows-7 system.
download the w7 upgrade advisor to check for any issues:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] laylang=en

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HappyBison   11-14-2009 at 03:16:50 AM

RAID 1 (mirroring) is the only option with 2 drives for you. You will gain a higher reliability only in this case.

I'm not sure if you even need a RAID in this case, unless your store some really important (and not easily recoverable-redownloadable) data on it.


Message edited by HappyBison on 11-14-2009 at 03:17:53 AM
Reply to HappyBison
dgre005   11-14-2009 at 03:20:26 AM

Thanks for the suggestion...yeah I guess I could probably just install Vista and XP on the 2 separate drives instead...

Reply to dgre005
HappyBison   11-14-2009 at 03:29:45 AM

Or use one for OS/System, while another one for your data, photos and other stuff.

Reply to HappyBison
dgre005   11-14-2009 at 11:20:30 AM

Yes, that's probably a better option...and use a 'normal' hard drive for the data etc...

Reply to dgre005
geofelt   11-14-2009 at 09:00:58 PM
Best answer

If you have to post the question, then you don't need raid of any type.
I know; smartass remark, but no offense intended.

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki- [...] iveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 for protecting data is that you can recover from a hard drive failure quickly.
It is for servers that can't afford any down time.
Recovery from a hard drive failure is just moments.
Fortunately hard drives do not fail often.
Mean time to failure is claimed to be on the order of 1,000,000 hours.(100 years)
Raid-1 does not protect you from other types of losses such as viruses,
software errors,raid controller failure, operator error, or fire...etc.
For that, you need EXTERNAL backup.
If you have external backup, and can afford some recovery time, then you don't need raid-1.

Consider the merits of concentrating on a simple single windows-7 system.
download the w7 upgrade advisor to check for any issues:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] laylang=en

Reply to geofelt
dgre005   11-15-2009 at 01:09:57 AM

Hmmm...yes I see, thanks for the input. It's just that I bought a RAID motherboard and I thought
I could gain some sort of benefit from using RAID, oh well. The WD Caviar blacks should be more reliable
than other drives, so RAID 1 is a bit redundant for my purposes I guess...

Reply to dgre005
HappyBison   11-15-2009 at 04:09:21 AM

dgre005,
None of the drives could be considered as 100% reliable.
When I need reliability, then I do backups on removable media like DVD or my network storage drive (which is RAID 1). Each of my own PC has one single drive in each, I can always reinstall the software in case of hard drive failure. I backup important and non-recoverable data only.

Reply to HappyBison
dgre005   11-23-2009 at 03:17:32 PM

Thanks for all your answers...

Reply to dgre005
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