More clarification with raid

I have read a lot about raid and learned a lot from some of your threads.
Raid 0 faster than raid 5 seems to be the consensus.
I would to have much more speed like raid 0 and the redundancy of raid 5.
I currently have (4) 500 gig in raid 5 system thank god because one of the drives died after 2 years use and unplugged old then plugged in new and go.
I have about 700 gigs of data and growing with audio, video, and pictures for my businesses.
Should I setup a raid 10 for speed and backup?
I was looking at an external setup with (4) 500gig in raid 0 and an additional set of 4 raid 1 the first set.
Thanks

In your case you need to put serious effort into getting a way to get a backup going offsite. If lightning were to take out 2 of your drives you would not recover with your current setup. You've only used about 1/2 your current space so this is the route I recommend before you begin to think about expanding.

Just keep picturing some 'disaster' (God forbid it ever happen) that takes out your entire system or building.

Sorry for the rant but I've seen many soho users loose everythig because they thought they were safe.

Ok thanks… that helps. The raid setup 0+1 with 8 drives is only setup 0,1,5,0+1 not 10 I thought 10 was 0+1 or 1+0 I’ll have to do a little more research but from what you said I was just starting to lean toward raid 1 with backups.

I have an internal 1.5tb drive I use for backups and just started using mozy to backup off site.

I’ve had two major crashing in 10 years one cost well let’s just say a lot of money because I was ignorant of backing ups. So I started backing up religiously, dual backups on external drives and DVD until my next crash 4-5 years later and learned the DVDs somewhere along the line didn’t burn right or whatever and when I went to use the usb drive its master file table got corrupted somehow. Of course only when I needed them…

so about that time I learned a little about raid systems… tried a raid 0 the one that mirrors and the mft got corrupted and corrupted both the main and mirror because I was messing with something in windows… so since then I have had a raid 5 system with 2 backup drives and DVD general backups not image backups, and now in the last few months mozy.

So I think after what you said I may reset the 4 drives to stripe for speed and backup weekly on my extra big drive and real time backup offsite to mozy… yah your right I’ve lost a computer to lighting luckily it didn’t have anything important on it. Well thanks for the help.

Jarid