2 raid 1 vs 1 raid 5?

[GeneralBear]

i plan on getting 4 4tb drives for my rig to act as a server just wondering what would be better 2x4tb in raid 1 or 4x4tb in raid 5? also my biso suports it but will windows see it? and can a motherboard do more then 1 raid config?

[olan1225]

The advantage of RAID 5 is that you will get 12TB storage available instead of 8TB with RAID10 which is what i believe you want. (2 HDDs in RAID0 and copies of them like a RAID1) The advantage of RAID10 is that the speed will be much faster especially if you are using the BIOS-RAID. The speed of a RAID5 config in BIOS is likely to be very slow or use your cpu more then you may want since the computer must translate all the things you save to your array with NAND-logic! 

[GeneralBear]

as long as it can file transfer to my media pc i dont mind i dont game on my pc or what when streaming. and i forgot about raid 10 i was actuly thinking 2 diffrent raid 1 arays would raid 5 be a vivable salution ive trippled my collection in the last year form 1tb to just voer 3tb. also would it be possable to raid 1 ssds plus raid 5 the 4tbs on my mobos controler gaz77x udh5?

[.Jay]

Long story short - if you don't need one big block of storage, and can get away with two different blocks, do two raid1s.  Myself any other people have horror stories about raid 5's dumping out and losing data.  Most of the time people are using a raid5 or 6 is because they can not fit all of their data on the same volume so they expand it with the raid.  But, with a nice zfs setup, you can get some good throughput with multiple drives (just run backups to another enclosure).  

 

Long story even shorter - if you are ok with 90-120mb/s performance and can get away with a raid1 ...do it.  Worst case, incase of failure, would be you pulling the drive and booting it in another machine.  Parity is the devil and it has bit me once in the past so I cover my tracks if I use it.

[GeneralBear]

would the raid 1 selution be safer? plan on growing my media collection past 4tb soon could care less if its on diffrent drives i just dont want to have to re rip everything

[.Jay]

In case of failure, Raid 1 would allow you to take the working drive of the pair and plug it into any other machine to get the data, or replace the bad drive and let it resync.  If you use a software raid, in windows, you need to manually go and start the sync/re-sync.  If you use the bios raid controller or a raid controller card, you boot into the raid bios and start the re-sync.  Pro grade servers will start resyncing when the new drive is swapped, while on.  

 

With anything over raid1, there is parity.  Because of parity, you can't just plug the drive into another machine and use it - some of its data is on the other cards and managed by the raid card.  Part of each drive is on another drive of the volume.  If you run into multiple drive issues and/or rebuilds, you can loose your array.  That is TB's of saved items.  That is why people mirror huge arrays to another device so there are complete backups.  Failure costs too much - The data loss is huge.

[h264]

Might as well do raid 6 if your gonna do 4 drives and you don't feel safe enough with Raid 5.  You get the same 2 failures and one whole array. Unless you WANT two.

[GeneralBear]

In case of failure, Raid 1 would allow you to take the working drive of the pair and plug it into any other machine to get the data, or replace the bad drive and let it resync.  If you use a software raid, in windows, you need to manually go and start the sync/re-sync.  If you use the bios raid controller or a raid controller card, you boot into the raid bios and start the re-sync.  Pro grade servers will start resyncing when the new drive is swapped, while on.  

 

With anything over raid1, there is parity.  Because of parity, you can't just plug the drive into another machine and use it - some of its data is on the other cards and managed by the raid card.  Part of each drive is on another drive of the volume.  If you run into multiple drive issues and/or rebuilds, you can loose your array.  That is TB's of saved items.  That is why people mirror huge arrays to another device so there are complete backups.  Failure costs too much - The data loss is huge.

2 raid 1s sounds like a good plan to me then less efficant on use of hardrives but more redundent.

 

Might as well do raid 6 if your gonna do 4 drives and you don't feel safe enough with Raid 5.  You get the same 2 failures and one whole array. Unless you WANT two.

my motherboard dosent offer raid 6

[.Jay]

good choice.  Only when dealing with files that need TB's of space each should you use parity.  I will come back to bite ya at some point.  If your using the same drives in 5years ...they would have been spinning for 5years.  Another good thing is, when they aren't in use, they can turn off.  With a raid5-10 the parity keeps writing to all of them, and they have to all stay on for the volume to function.  You do have to wait an extra 5+ seconds for the drives to spin up (if they are a sleep) ....but from then on you are good.  I rather the drives shut down since it saves things in the long run.

[GeneralBear]

good choice.  Only when dealing with files that need TB's of space each should you use parity.  I will come back to bite ya at some point.  If your using the same drives in 5years ...they would have been spinning for 5years.  Another good thing is, when they aren't in use, they can turn off.  With a raid5-10 the parity keeps writing to all of them, and they have to all stay on for the volume to function.  You do have to wait an extra 5+ seconds for the drives to spin up (if they are a sleep) ....but from then on you are good.  I rather the drives shut down since it saves things in the long run.

will i have to worrie about doing stagger startup on the drives so it dosent hit my psu all at once? looking at a ax750 from corsair and going in my main rig in my sig right now i got a cheap Tt  tr2 600w but only 6 sata ports all in use so gonna upgraid to the ax 750 unless i can find a better psu or somthing from memoryexpress (cheapest shipping and best worentie in my area)

 

can a single chipset run 2 diffrent raid 1s?

[sybreeder]

will i have to worrie about doing stagger startup on the drives so it dosent hit my psu all at once? looking at a ax750 from corsair and going in my main rig in my sig right now i got a cheap Tt  tr2 600w but only 6 sata ports all in use so gonna upgraid to the ax 750 unless i can find a better psu or somthing from memoryexpress (cheapest shipping and best worentie in my area)

 

can a single chipset run 2 diffrent raid 1s?

Yes you can configure multiple independent raid like 2 raid 1 but this is not really good idea to use that disks only for raid 1 - use raid 10 and you'll get at least some speed :)

You mentioned that this will be server - what OS you plan to use?

How you'd like to add new drivers after some period of time ? just by adding plain raid 1 mirrors ?

If that pc will only used as a network storage it would nice idea to use ZFS. It's relative easy to expand ZFS array.

Remember also that in case of fake raid used in motherboards - raid controller is very sensitive to errors on disk. If 1 disk will lock for a moment - your raid array can lose drive from array.Disk with TLER is very recommended like WD Red.

[GeneralBear]

gonna be my main rig I dont want to go to a higher raid for issues eith parity drives will be winddows 7 at the moment but will ve going windows 8 itz only gonns be a file server the htpcs will be decoding the files so dosent need to be fast plus raid 1 is simple

[.Jay]

will i have to worrie about doing stagger startup on the drives so it dosent hit my psu all at once? looking at a ax750 from corsair and going in my main rig in my sig right now i got a cheap Tt  tr2 600w but only 6 sata ports all in use so gonna upgraid to the ax 750 unless i can find a better psu or somthing from memoryexpress (cheapest shipping and best worentie in my area)

 

can a single chipset run 2 diffrent raid 1s?

 

No you will not have an issue with them all firing up.  A hard drive pulls maybe 20watts per drive so its very small.  Now if you fire up 20-30 drives at the same time you can see how that might be an issue.  I do not use onboard raid so I am not sure if it can do two raid1's.  With the speed of the 7200rpm drives, its a pretty sweet deal.  I remember when 7200 drives were 1/2 the speed they are now.  For home, I stick with WD black drives and haven't run into any issues.

[GeneralBear]

their gonan be 5900 rpm drives ill be using but seams fast

[.Jay]

Stick with your two raid1's.  Parity is the devil.  Only consider parity its for backups or if your data has files larger then what one drive will hold.  </end>

[GeneralBear]

do people have files over 4tb? that seams crazy and yeah now hopefully my chipset can do 2 raid 1s on 1 controler

[.Jay]

^sure there are databases over 4tb.  Or to be even more practical, people have groups of files that are larger then 4tb in total.  Also some people that are clustering would need large volumes to failover to other boxes etc (there are plenty of reasons why someone needs a certain setup).  I am just throwing that $.02 out there, as I understand its not going to pertain to many people.

[GeneralBear]

will doing a chipset raid 1 will it whipe the data off the drive?

[IdeaStormer]

If you even want to find out how long your RAID 1 rebuild will take you can test it out. Just pull out one of your drives from one of the RAID 1 setups and re-format it (on a different computer or your current computer through a USB dock or something like that). You can pull it out while the system is running (aka disconnect the SATA controller), you mileage may vary with this one, I've seen systems blue screen or

just shutdown when this happens to them, but this basically will take you through that failure mode. Re-format that one drive and re-install it into the drive array (may need to reboot to do this) you can view the RAID degration via the RAID BIOS or RAID software after re-booting. Then you can rebuild that RAID array.

 

Why go through that mess? Well if you don't test it out how do you know its working as advertised? You can test with test data if you don't want to lose your actual data. Also, lets you go through the failure mode for experience, so when you do hit it you know how to proceed.

 

Almost forgot, I would label the drives and cables as to which port they go and which RAID array, makes things easier to pin point when things go wrong. As in RAID 1 Alpha, SATA Port 0, RAID 1 Alpha Port 1, RAID 1 Beta Port 2, RAID 1 Beta Port3. Or which ever naming convention makes things obvious for you. A permanent black magic marker works great, assuming your cables aren't black.

[GeneralBear]

i currently using 1 of the drives im gonna put in the array thing is when i make the array will i loose the info on it? will i have to backup my 3tb on my random 2tb and 1tb drives?

[GeneralBear]

necro post: would transfering a chipset raid 1 to a dyfrent system would i loose the data plan on building a dedicated server in a year or so when i have the spare cash for it

[Eric1024]

necro post: would transfering a chipset raid 1 to a dyfrent system would i loose the data plan on building a dedicated server in a year or so when i have the spare cash for it

as long as you're using an intel chipset on both computers, the array will still be recognized. I had to remove a dead 1tb drive from a raid 1 array on my sister's z77 system and I moved it over to my x79 system to try to see if it was still alive/usable and the drive was still recognized as an array member by the chipset, even though it was a different chipset from a different platform.

 

Back to your original question though. 2x2drive raid 1 arrays, if configured together in JBOD (NOT raid 0 to make raid 10, but JBOD) would achieve 2x the IOPS of a single drive, and up to 4x read IOPS if you're using a raid solution that will load balance read requests across multiple drives in a RAID 1 array. (chipset raid doesn't do this to the best of my knowledge, but you'll still get 2x IOPS). raid 5 on the other hand will get you much higher sequential performance, at the risk of slightly less data security (arguably). RAID 1 will also get you less space.

 

So it depends, do you want sequential performance, or random performance?