2 Separate raid 0 arrays with SSD

[keygenx]

I am building a mega rig for one of my clients.I don't know the purpose but he asked specifically for SSDs in Raid with huge storage space and less risk of data loss.

Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme

I am going for 2 separate Raid 0 arrays:
(1). 2x OCZ VERTEX 3 SATA III 240GB
(2). 4x OCZ COLOSSUS 2 SERIES SATA II 960GB


(1) is for installing the OS.
(2) for normal storage.


Is there a better option with other raid configurations??
Will the inbuilt raid controller in Asus rampage be able to handle this??Do i need a PCIe RAID controller?(The mobo already has 4x GPUs)

Please help me.
(My client don't care about the expense so theoretically theres an unlimited budget)

 

[CaedenV]

RAID 0 will always increase the chance of data loss, not lessen it.

I would suggest RAID1 for the system drive, because it will give faster read performance, but still the same write performance of a single drive (generally you do not write much to the system drive except for installing programs... which is generally limited by your CD/download speed anyways. If you are using this drive for rendering then it could be OK to do a RAID0, but be sure to make a backup image periodically in the event of a drive failure.

For the storage I would suggest RAID 5 or 10, but absolutely not 0 as this is where all important files live.
5 is a little slower than 10, and takes a CPU hit to operate, but only looses a single drive of space for redundancy (capacity is n-1).
10 gives a little more performance and less CPU overhead than 5, but will always be 50% of the total drive capacity (capacity is n/2).


I love OCZ and have their SSDs in my and my wife's rig, but these are throw-away drives, and not suggested when reliability is of concern. I would stick with Intel or Crucial M4 drives for this type of build.

 

[CaedenV]

Oh, and I have no idea if the mobo will have the capability to handle 2 seperate raids with a total of 6 drives.


Also, Stick with SATA 3 drives. While in theory SATA3 drives would overwhelm the SATA2 controller, the real world is a different place. Uncompressable data only moves at ~150-200MB/s on the fastest of SATA3 drives, which is still faster than their SATA2 counterparts, but still slower than the max throughput of the SATA2 interface. Compressable data will hit a bottleneck, but with this kind of build/budget it is better to hit a limit than to have unused potential.

 

[geofelt]

If your client asked for raid, and did not specify what type, then perhaps he does not understand the purpose for raid. I suspect that the interest is in fault tolerance and not sequential speed. I think this should be clarified.
What is the primary intended use for this pc?

As to reliability of SSD's, I think you are better off with Intel. Here is one older report on component return rates:
OCZ has not been high on the list.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, fire, theft, raid controller failure, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

I think I would just use large Intel 520 drives, they come in sizes up to 480gb. Even the 320 series would be good, they come in 600gb size.

Use one for the os and apps. Attach the rest individually as separate drives. If a single large virtual mage is needed, that can be done with software spanning or concatination.

If raid, of whatever type is a necessity, then consider a raid card with a discrete raid processor.
It will have more performance and reliability features than motherboard raid will.

 

[keygenx]

The motherboard has 4x SATA 3 and 4x SATA 2 ports

So can i do:
2x Intel 520 series 240gb : Raid 1 (2x SATA 3)
6x Intel 520 series 480gb : Raid 5 (2x SATA 3 + 4x SATA 2)

2 SATA III and 4 SATA II raided together, will it work?

 

[foscooter]

First, the mobo does have 4 SATA III ports, but 2 are from an add-on controller. They may not be able to RAID, and not with the Intel ports.

So, you are left with 6 ports: 2 SATA III, 4 SATA II.

RAID the OS drives on SATA III. RAID the Data drives on SATA II.

You can cross RAID the ports, but you will only get the lower ports speeds. You can also set up mutliple RAID arrays, choosing which drives for which RAID.

You didn't mention an Optical drive, which may have to be on the native Intle SATA ports! This will leave you with 5 open ports. 2-SATA III (OS), 3-SATA II (Data). So I don't think RAID 5 will work.

I'll look deeper into the mobo specs.

You need some clarity form the customer: RAID 0 for speed, RAID 1 for "backups" or RAID 5 for redundancy.

 

[keygenx]

So am going for
2x intel 520series 480GB (SATA III ports) Raid 0
2x 1TB SSD (SATA II ports) Raid 1

So which manufacturer has 1 TB SSD??
I don't think colossus 1tb is seeling any more.

 

[CaedenV]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227765
or wait for the new R4 drives which should start shipping relatively soon and will be cheaper per GB, while offering sizes up to 16TB