RAID Advice..

[kdw75]

I am wanting to set up a RAID system and I am not sure which direction I should go and which hardware is suitable. I have an Asus P9X79 Pro motherboard that says it supports Raid 0,1,5 and 10. I have heard though that using the on-board controller may cause problems in the event of a motherboard failure or upgrade.

I am looking for something that isn't too expensive, but must be reliable in the event of a single drive failing and allow for me to plug in a new drive and rebuilt itself. I also want it to follow me through motherboard upgrades, which are typically every 12-18 months. I need decent speed on par with a fast 7200 RPM if not better. Storage wise I need around 4TB right now and will need more in the near future, probably 6TB would be good for another couple years.

Do you recommend using the MB RAID or an external box? If I should go external then I don't want to spend over four or five hundred dollars on the box, not including the drives.

I do of course backup to an online service, but downloading all that data would be a last resort.

 

[RealBeast]

If you want to upgrade your motherboard and keep the array, I would not use the on-board controller for RAID. I would either use an Adaptec 6405 card or equivalent, or an external 4 drive enclosure that has RAID 5 capability. Either will migrate along with you to new motherboards without an issue, and if you have a pile of old parts and you go with a card solution, you can piece together an NAS box of your own.

Four 7200rpm 2Tb drives in RAID 5 will give you very good performance. Do you need a networked NAS or will you attach it to a primary computer with eSATA?

 

[geofelt]

How important is instant recovery from a drive failure to you?
For a server, it might be critical. For a home user not so much so.

Raid 1 is mirroring. It duplicates all updates to a second drive so a single drive failure can be recovered from instantly.
Fortunately, drive failures are not very frequent.
Some advertise 500,000 hours mean time to failure. That is something like 50 years.

Since raid-1 duplicates a drive, even a motherboard raid chipset failure should leave you protected.

I think you might be better off to also use an external locally attached backup device if you want to improve your recovery times in the event of a virus, fire, or whatever.

 

[kdw75]

If you want to upgrade your motherboard and keep the array, I would not use the on-board controller for RAID. I would either use an Adaptec 6405 card or equivalent, or an external 4 drive enclosure that has RAID 5 capability. Either will migrate along with you to new motherboards without an issue, and if you have a pile of old parts and you go with a card solution, you can piece together an NAS box of your own.

Four 7200rpm 2Tb drives in RAID 5 will give you very good performance. Do you need a networked NAS or will you attach it to a primary computer with eSATA?

I only need it to be hooked to one machine.

I would like to be able to keep on working if a drive failed and just pop in a new drive without interruption. I had read that RAID 5 had some flaws so I was thinking RAID 10 or 6 setup might be better for me.

 

[RealBeast]

I only need it to be hooked to one machine.

I would like to be able to keep on working if a drive failed and just pop in a new drive without interruption. I had read that RAID 5 had some flaws so I was thinking RAID 10 or 6 setup might be better for me.

RAID 5 doesn't have "flaws," but it can only lose one drive, while RAID 6 can lose 2. You can also have a hot plugged backup to start an immediate rebuild.

How important are read vs. write speeds for your use? Any budget constraints, RAID 5 takes less drives that the others to provide the space you need.

During a rebuild, either RAID 5 or 6 will be slower in storage use until the rebuild is done, but hopefully that is not a common occurrence for you.

 

[sub mesa]

RAID5 in many cases does not provide the protection that you assume it grants you. For example, a RAID5 may fail if multiple disks have bad sectors, a very common occurrence today.

I would not recommend to use RAID5 or hardware RAID to provide data security on Windows platforms. If on Windows, you should invest in backups because there is no reliable RAID or filesystem technology available. If you are content on building a computer specifically for storage, like a ZFS NAS, then yes you can store files reliably without fear of corruption or bad sectors. But beware that Windows-based RAIDs are inherently unsafe. If you want me to explain that, why not look up the need for TLER on Windows/Hardware RAID platforms and explain to me first why you need TLER in the first place. Then read these documents and explain why the author thinks RAID5 and RAID6 can no longer provide the advertised protection with todays harddrives:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/805