New Build with two kinds of RAID?

[beenthere22]

I am building a new computer, ground up, new components.

ASUS p7p55d-e Deluxe mb
Intel i7 860 cpu
Antec 750 High Current Pro p/s
Geoforce GT220
Have five NEW WD TB drives
Windows 7 Ultimate o/s
4gb RAM on one chip (forget the specs right now)
I have two TB's of remote backup, which covers the essential information.

I will use this for modest editing of low end video for training, power points, graphics management. However, I have tons of material I use to putting together the training, hence the TB's of drives.

I was thinking that this might be a good time for RAID implementation. The ASUS p7p55d-e Deluxe mb handles RAID 0 through 10.

Dependability takes slight advantage over speed, but I am greedy and want both.

Having never done an RAID configuration, I need advice about possible configurations:

#1 Put the OS and programs on a RAID-0 -- using two drives
Put two more drives with the data on RAID-1 -- redundancy

#2 put OS/programs and data on 3 or 4 drives using Raid 5

#3 Put os/programs and dates on 4 drives using Raid 10

I am sure that there are variants.

Any suggestions or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Mr Pizza]

Having never done an RAID configuration, I need advice about possible configurations:

#1 Put the OS and programs on a RAID-0 -- using two drives
Put two more drives with the data on RAID-1 -- redundancy

#2 put OS/programs and data on 3 or 4 drives using Raid 5

#3 Put os/programs and dates on 4 drives using Raid 10

I am sure that there are variants.

Any suggestions or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

Put OS and programs on an SSD and get a storage drive with no raid.

if you don't want to do that...

Don't put the OS on more than 2 drives in raid... it can get screwy..

Put OS and programs on RAID 0 and the rest with no raid... RAID 1 doesn't improve performance and drives don't fail that often.. so youll be fine.

 

[batuchka]

A few things u should know about SATA/USB 3.0 tech and mobos as shown by our very own forums here
USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, Motherboards, And Overcoming Bottlenecks
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3.0-sata-6gb,2583.html
Also note that LGA 1156 shall be usurped by LGA 1155 as soon as end of this year/possible Q1 next year if u intending to sink a wee bit on chip + board FYI...
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/21/intel-sandy-bridge-details-of-the-next-gen/

If $$ no object i would rather hit a LGA 1366 or if not gaming and paying needlessly high $$ for a mobo does not make sense: IGP/Thuban X6

 

[beenthere22]

I have all the components on hand and am building the system.

I have $750 tried up in the I7860 CPU, the RAM, the ASUS board, the 900 case, the Windows S/W, graphics card, DVD burner, and five new WD TB drives. I already have the routers, display, etc. I like. All the components were new, except for the case and the keyboard. So, I am not going to change much....there is not need to.

I have had two boot drives go bad in five years. So, I do know that drives go bad.

since I have five new WD TB drives, I still think it is a good idea to plain a RAID implementation.

My files tend to be large 6mb to 1gb+....and I have a lot of them.

I also have two used SATA drives from my old system and external drives for back up.

Put one SATA for boot drive and the other four drives in RAID 10?

Just looking for input on RAID and trying to expand my horizons.

 

[coldsleep]

I'd go with 1 single boot drive, and back it up to the RAID array. (And thank goodness for someone who is aware of the dangers of disk failure.)

Your only real options are RAID 10 and RAID 5. It really depends on what you're looking for. With 4x 1 TB drives, if 2 TB is enough for you, I'm a big fan of RAID 10. Then again I've mostly worked at large companies, where you can throw money at problems to try to make them go away. RAID 10 could be slightly faster at reading/writing than straight RAID 0, as it can access any one of the 4 drives.

RAID 5 would give you 3 TB usable, if storage space is a bigger concern. Read performance will be better than RAID 10, but write performance might be on par or slower, due to calculating parity.

 

[Abe Froman]

Wow, I can't believe how many posts there are on this thread that are so far off topic. They answered every other question, except the one you asked.

Only coldsleep commented on the topic and I agree with everything that he (or she) said. Coldsleep seems to have some valuable experience.

#1 Put the OS and programs on a RAID-0 -- using two drives
Put two more drives with the data on RAID-1 -- redundancy

#2 put OS/programs and data on 3 or 4 drives using Raid 5

#3 Put os/programs and dates on 4 drives using Raid 10

I would probably go with a single drive for boot, and a RAID 10 with the other 4 drives. If not that, then option 3, 1, and then 2. Good luck and have fun.


Other thoughts related to this topic:

I have had never had a drive fail, but several of my roommates had. One of my roomies even had his main storage drive fail, and then his external backup storage drive failed 30 hours later. He lost everything. He was devastated.

Those drives were both about 1 year old, and were different models and capacities. Drives do fail. No matter the brand, either. Don't ever try to say that they don't. To say that they don't fail is ridiculous. They may fail rarely, yes. But when (not if) it happens to you, it will undoubtedly be too soon, am I right?

Regular backups are important too, just in case you delete a file that you meant to keep.

But backups can only save data from a particular moment in time (say goodbye to that file you created 2 minutes ago), and are timely to create and to restore data from. That's where RAID arrays come in. Instant redundancy is not foolish or overly-cautious. It's smart. Expensive? Depends on the value you place on your files I guess.

After my roommate's hard drive's failed, I implemented a RAID 1 for my storage using using an integrated motherboard controller and a pair of 250 GB PATA drives that I had purchased refurbished from Woot and had previously been using in different capacities. As it was my first time with such an experiment, and none of my friends had ever implemented a RAID, I was a nervous noob. But it worked fine.

When it was time for my next build, I started in a similar position to where beenthere22 is now. In 2008, I purchased four 500GB HDDs and did some testing. I tried a RAID 1 with two 500 GB drives split into 2 partitions (2 bootable OSes, WinXP32 and Vista64, and each with accompanying software). I wanted to be up and running no matter what. I also used another RAID 1 with the remaining 2 drives for my main data storage, such as documents, photos, music, and movies.

For the most part it worked great. But I did learn a few things through a long series of frustrating bumps along the way. All in all, I am pleased with the knowledge and experience I've gained, and above all, the peace of mind that my data is pretty darn safe.

On month after completing my new 2008 build, I took my new system over to a friend's house for a LAN party. I got there and started up my system. The system turned on but would not boot successfully. Finally I could see that I had a failing OS boot drive. No matter! I simply opened up the machine and unplugged the data and power cables connecting to the bad drive. Total down time: 12 minutes. I was playing games with my buddies as if nothing had happened!

Since then I have moved away from using a RAID on my OS drives, only due to lack of funding for more bigger drives.

Lessons I've unfortunately had to learn:

1) Sometimes a bad SATA cable can be the cause of all your problems. Or it could be just the connector on one end of your cable. Or it could be the data connector on the HDD or on the motherboard is bad. Be extremely careful when detaching SATA cables--you should take care to press the release latch every time so as to avoid damaging your expensive HDDs. After months of troubleshooting various components, I finally replaced all the SATA cables that were included with my motherboard and low and behold I finally stopped having RAID sync errors. Imagine that.

2) You should be able to reboot your machine during a disk re-sync with no problem. I mention this because a re-sync can take a long time, 1-3 hours usually. However you may want to check your documentation first.

2) Because the motherboard I have been using is an EVGA NVidia 780i, if I want, I can install the Motherboard drivers and it allows me to control all the RAID settings via the NVidia control panel. The downside is that there is no way to gauge the temperature of any HDDs that are in a RAID--at least that's how it is with this motherboard.