Do I need a raid class hard drive for raid?

chedderslam1976

Distinguished
Nov 24, 2008
463
0
18,790
The raid 1 array on my server has dropped a drive. They are old 150gb ide drives that I've had for quite some time. Any ide drive is more than I want to spend, so I figure I will upgrade.

The server is used for development of ColdFusion and SQL Server, and a media backup. Performance is not a huge deal.

I'm looking at a few.

I currently have three spinpoint f1 raid editions in a raid 5 array on my dev box. I could mirror that on the server, allowing me to back up across the network. I don't think I raelly need raid 5 though. A couple of terabyte drives in raid 1 should be enough.

So here are my choices:

Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

$160x2

SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive

$150x2

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

$90x2, or I could get three for raid 5 for the price of the other two drives.

So what should I get?

Also, I am looking at this card:
Rosewill RC-222 PCI Low Profile Ready SATA Controller Card - Retail

Any issues with it? My only concern is safety of data.
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
But come from the same manufacturer line; so most of that claims is just bullshit.

It does give you more warranty and a small firmware 'upgrade'; that's it. Physically its the same drive as the non-RAID edition drives. So whether you want to pay more is up to you.

Now of course we will have the discussion on whether you need TLER or not. The short version of that discussion is: "no, you don't".
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
Fine as in, it will work? Sure.

Fine as in, i wouldnt have any RAID problems? nahhh RAID problems are all too common, especially with the low-quality RAID support available to Windows.

And because of misalignment issues virtually every Windows user had crappy RAID speeds, so not much benefit at all. Windows 7 should be fine though. Unless you set the stripesize lower than 128KiB.
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
Please also know that RAID can * N * E * V * E * R * replace a backup - those are two different things. RAID1 is perfect for uptime guarantee; like mission-critical servers that lose millions of dollars just by being 'offline' for a few minutes; that's where RAID1 is useful. For home users, i think it provides a false sense of security and the slightest filesystem corruption, virus or accidental deletion will cause dataloss not covered by the RAID.
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
Alright. Also, try to avoid any PCI card for RAID. Its just as bad (even worse) than onboard RAID and really hurts performance. If possible use onboard RAID by the motherboard - Intel ICHxR is the best onboard RAID controller. Many formats can also be used under linux' md-raid.

If performance is not a huge deal, you may want to look at 5400rpm 1TB drives. These are much more suitable to mass data storage (large files) than 7200rpm+ drives. The benefits of less heat, lower temperatures, less noise, less airflow required, less energy consumption and generally the same performance for sequential I/O. They may also be more reliable than their faster moving 7200rpm disks, though those stats will only be true if you compare thousands of 5400rpm against thousands of 7200rpm drives.
 

chedderslam1976

Distinguished
Nov 24, 2008
463
0
18,790
This is my old machine that has been relegated to server status. P4 3.0. Only has one agp and some pci slots. I will eventually get a new motherboard, processor, ram, etc, but can't spend the money right now. So I'm stuck with pci.
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
If it has no onboard RAID then you're stuck with PCI yes. Will it run Windows? If not, you can probably use software-RAID instead; assuming you have at least 2 SATA ports on your P4 motherboard. This solution would be much better than a PCI card.

But as you say, performance is not that important, just configuring a PCI RAID card is pretty easy - but has its disadvantages and you may experience one of the many quirks of these PCI cards. If you will be using Windows there isn't really an alternative though.