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Hey LTT NAS enthusiasts. I'm considering purchasing a Synology NAS to set up RAID 10. Is there a way to specify in their software which drives RAID 1 mirrors and which ones RAID 0 stripes? Long story short, I have 6 drives, 3 from WD and 3 from Seagate, same capacity & specs . I want to ensure that mirror drives in a set aren't from the same vendor. If such a thing isn't possible via software, would alternating them while inserting into the bay do the trick? I'm a little worried that Synology might randomly pick drives for mirroring, and I'd end up with 2 drives from the same vendor purchased from the same batch, increasing the likelihood of 2 drive failure and RAID 10 non-recoverability. Apologies if someone has already answered this. I've searched for this info in various forums and the Synology manual but couldn't find an answer.. Thank you

Hello, I currently have a server that is running four disks in RAID 10 on a RAID card. The server is running Windows Server 2016. I am soon going to transfer the files over to a new machine that is running better hardware but would really like to keep all of my data as it currently sits so that I wouldn't need to essentially set up the OS and programs/file structures and that whole jazz again manually. I have the possibility to take backups from my server with the built-in software in the Server Manager, but I have never tested it out and I'm not sure if that will even work as I think it will. Please ask me for more info if necessary. I appreciate all the help. My question is as following; Is there an easy way for me to transfer my setup over to the new machine like I was just moving the disks over (don't worry I am not going to just do that) and keep my things exactly as it currently is without needing to set it all up again. Thanks!

quick question maybe not quick I have 2 identical ocz SSD's, at 240 gb apiece. I want to raid 0, but data loss is a thing. I have a thrid drive, a 500gb 7200 rpm laptop hard drive. Can you (or even should you) raid 10 between three different drives? where I raid 1 the hdd against the 2 ssd's?

I have a computer case with 3 x 3.5" hard drive bays. I want to put 3 x 4TB hard drives in there, and RAID them to total them to 12TB. I am looking for a way to make 12TB of storage. What do you think is my best solution?

So a while ago, I bought four enterprise WD drives in order to create a RAID 10 device for my mass media etc. Unfortunately, I have figured out that if I turn on RAID mode in the UEFI and create my RAID volume, my PC just tries to load windows but gives me INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE Error. I thought my Windows Anniversary update would solve this (Version 1607), but it didn't. In the UEFI, I have made it so my SSD is the only boot device allowed and Number #1 Priority. I have tried so many troubleshooting steps and I really need this RAID array as I am running out of space on my 300gb hdd. If any of you can provide suggestions or some form of feedback please do. And finally, don't criticise me on my RAID array or any other system part, I just really need help and to know what to do. You can look on the profile page for my system specs. Thanks!

I'm about building my first PC for work and personal use and I've got a RAID 10 (x4 850 Evos). I haven't built it yet so no previous OS will be on it but I want to install Windows 10 and onto the SSD(s) without an optical drive that have a RAID 10 config. I've tried researching but, being a rookie at this I understand hardly anything and left slightly more confused as I've never built a computer before let alone boot an OS onto it without an optical drive and on a RAID 10 SSD config. I thought I'd come here to see if I could get help on my specific situation so that I don't screw things up. I tried finding the solution before posting this but couldn't find one on this forum. Sorry now if it's a dupe. - Install Windows 10 without optical drive (I guess USB but many sites show different methods) - Install the OS onto a RAID 10 config (or do you config to RAID 10 after?) Thanks in advance! SH

I was just wondering, I have a RAID 10 Array with four 320GB hdds (640gb Effective Storage), how much SSD storage would I need for a cache for that array? I ask causeI'm upgrading my boot ssd and I now have a pointless 60gb Adata SP510 lying around. Thank you!

Hello All, I aim to create a RAID 10, but already have two of the drives I'll be using (Currently in RAID 1.) I They're Deskstar NAS 4TB with 64MB Cache bought in 2015. Still for sale for US$148, but their upgraded counterpart with 128MB cache is actually cheaper at US$133. Will the efficiency of the RAID suffer by using drives with different cache sizes? It seems silly to spend more for older drives, but I'd rather not find out later that I should've made that call. Thanks! Jeremy

I am setting up a storage server for my family's family business and am conflicted on what RAID setup I should do. We have four 2TB WD Black drives for the server and I don't know if I should run them all in RAID 10 or do dual RAID 1's. I like the extra layer of redundancy with the dual RAID 1's but read and write performance is important because we have anywhere from 3 to 8 workstations hitting it all at once for extended periods of time (sometimes all 8 for nearly 10 hours). So would it be worth it to use the RAID 10 considering all the drives will be backed up nightly to a separate machine with 4 drives in a RAID 5 array?

Preface: I am not a pro, just showing what I found. So I obtained a Dell R610, dual Intel Xeon L5520, put in 47GB DDR3 1600 RAM (yes I know it's a 1066 MHz FSB, this ram actually had a lower CAS than the 1066 kit somehow and was the same price), put in six Seagate Savvio 10K.6 ST300MM0026 300GB 2.5" SAS 6Gb/s 10KRPM drives LINK, installed a PERC H700, got an iDRAC 6 card, Windows Server 2012 R2 standard and some CALs and fired 'er up. Keep in mind this is my first server rodeo, so far I think I'm doing pretty good. I did a lot of research on RAID configurations and decided I think I want to go with a RAID 10 array due to most of my workload being reads and the writes will mostly be random, but I wanted to be sure. So I first configured a single full size RAID 6 array, did a full initialize, did a fresh install of the OS and BAM here are the results, sorry this is a pic from my phone, I was on the KVM console and didn't have time to play around with snipping tool/ email etc.: (ignore the 15KRPM note, I for some reason thought they were 15K drives doing these tests lolol) Not too shabby right? Well I then rebooted the server, fired up the RAID card deleted the VD, created a full size RAID 10 array, did a full initialize, installed the OS and here are the results from that test: (this one I did through the iDRAC so I could use snipping tool haha): So here's what's troubling.. All seq. work, reads and writes, are slower on RAID 10, at a queue depth of 32 they are dramatically slower, at a 0 queue they are only a tad slower. 4k reads are, sure, twice as fast but onlt 2.4MB/s? 4K writes are indeed faster by an almost factor of 4, but the 4KQD32 results are atrocious, reads a full 1MB/s slower than a RAID 6? The only result I am happy about are the 4kQD32 writes, 23MB/s is pretty fast, relatively speaking. At the end of the day I was seriously hoping for sequential reads/ writes of 1GB/s on this array, unless I'm totally missing something, this array should be able to hit those marks on a RAID 10 config, and quite possibly close on a RAID 6 config as well. My question to you all, and the point of the thread, is this, shouldn't the RAID 10 results be overall better than RAID 6 at this size? And for all those curious, yes I did full initializes before installing the OS, battery backed write back cache is on, adaptive read ahead is on, and the strip size is 64KB. If anyone has any thoughts or questions, please post, I'm curious to see what others have to think! Thank you!

Hi guys! I'm looking to do a build with a SSD that will be used as my boot drive and will have all my games, music, and documents on it as well. I also am going to have 5 HDDs in RAID 10 for extra files and backups. I have watched the LTT video on setting up RAID and it appears that part of setting up RAID includes installing Windows on the RAID array. My question is, how do I setup RAID while also having my boot drive NOT be a part of my RAID array?

Will I be able to use raid 10 with only 3 drives? The idea is to have 2 HDD's running as raid 0, then combine the now raid 0 as one drive with an SSD to create a raid 1 array. Is this possible,do i need a raid controller? All and any information is welcom.

Does anyone have any tips for putting four drives into Raid 10? I have never messed around with putting HDDs into Raid so I was not sure if there is anything I should watch out for.

So I am thinking of ditching my server solution in favor of selling off my current ITX build and moving my 8700k into an ITX case, I have too many PC's and I find that I never actually use my server unless I am backing up data to it. Big waste of an i7-8700k and GTX 1080. So my question is the following: I have a RAID 10 config with 4x IronWolf 8TB hard drives using Windows Storage Spaces. And I'm thinking of moving them to an external hard drive enclosure, not a NAS enclosure. As is my RAID 10 config will basically work with any Windows 10 pc but if I move the array to an external hard drive solution that connects via USB 3.0 (or USB C) will Windows still recognize my RAID 10 array? That being said I will probably lose all of the advantages of having a RAID 10 array if I got external? What are my options for fast external hard drive solutions that allow me to use RAID 10 and benefit from the faster read/write speeds? I was looking at these two enclosures: https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817576026 https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817198061 Thanks in advance!

Hi all im planning to buy new gaming pc, but whats bother me is storage layout pc will be used only for gaming, so faster loading = better choise for me here are options im thinking about: 4x 2TB hdd in RAID 5 4x 2TB hdd in RAID 10 4x 500GB SSD in RAID 5 (probably overkill) 4x 500GB SSD in RAID 10 (probably overkill) 2x 500GB SSD in RAID 0 + 2TB HDD as everyday backup because i couldnt find any decent performance tests on 4ssd in raid, im asking here im more interested in performance than price so, feel free to share your opinion/experiences

Hey guys, i have a confusing problem. There is an exchange server running server 2016 with exchange, dns and as a file server (no virtual machines) Hardware is following and should be absolutely enough... Intel Xeon Silver 4108 8x1,8Ghz + HT 6x4GB DDR4 2400 ECC Supermicro X11SPL-F 4x 3TB Western Digital Purple WD30PURZ + case cooler etc. The 4 drives are actually running in an Onboard Intel (Fake)Raid 10, but with such an horrible performance, which is unbelieveable. CrystalDiskmark 1GB says 30MB/s read / around 150MB/s write. Ive tested the drives one by one as single drives and they reach around 150+ r/w solo. so... where is the problem? oO I thought 1 drive would be faulty, but actually its totally healthy and that wasnt the problem,... and now i dont get it anymore, i mean services are running and working speed is "okay" but this read speeds oO and if u find some mistakes... sorry english isnt my native language

**** EDIT **** See original post below. In light of what @Electronics Wizardy suggested, I deleted the RAID10 volume, and did the whole thing again but through Powershell, including the striping. This is still a RAID 10, so 2 two-way mirrors, but the -NumberOfColumns is set to 2 (a stripe per RAID 1 array). In what may be needless to say, performance is a lot better. Here are the numbers: CrystalDiskMark In this benchmark, we see scores which are roughly equal to the Storage Spaces + Disk Management Hybrid RAID10, but 4KiB Q8T8 and 4KiB Q32T1 did actually come out worse for Reads. Speed copying Hyper-V VM RAID10 (PS): 246 - 279MB/s AVG: 262.5MB/s This is significantly quicker than the hybrid solution I first used, with an increase on the average of 19%! As well as the speed bump, the fluctuations in speed are much less drastic. Read / Write test for Windows 10 ISO RAID10 (PS): 8.9s Write, 14.1s Read Again, much better than the hybrid solution, clocking around ~3 seconds faster for writes and ~2 seconds faster for reads, likely attributed to the decrease in speed fluctuations. Average Response Times RAID10 (PS): 476.3ms This is another big change. Gone from ~2 seconds of response time, down to around a quarter of it, even slightly faster than the per-disk response times. This again, is likely a contributing factor to the speed increases. To do this through PowerShell, I found this guide here. Note that instead of "Storage Spaces*" I had to use "Windows Storage*". To find out what you need to use, run the Get-StorageSubSystem command. Obviously I need to do some reading into some documentation for Storages Spaces. RTFM people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi there! TL;DR: Software RAID 10 in Windows works about as expected, in my experience. Skip to the end for the RAID 10 numbers and results! So, I was looking, and couldn't find any information on people's experience, or results of any kind of RAID 10 adventure on Windows, so, decided I'd do it myself. This post is pretty much my test results, and performance. My setup for this is a PC running as a central storage unit for my home, so it's not running anything spectacular, just some parts I had lying around: Hardware PSU: Corsair CX550M CPU: AMD A10-6800K @ 4.1GHz RAM: 16GB 2466MHz Corsair Vengeance MOBO: Asus A88XM-Plus OS: Crucial M4 SSD 4x WD Red 2TB NAS 5400RPM drives (This is what I RAIDed) Software Edition: Windows 10 Pro N Version: 1803 Build: 17134.228 PREAMBLE So, as above, there seems to be no information on what a RAID 10 is like on Windows, especially a software RAID, which is what I did; So I thought I'd share my results and experience. Setting up the RAID 10 was quick and simple, just set up 2 two-may mirrors in Storage Spaces (RAID 1), and then stripe the two mirrors together using Disk Management (RAID 0) to make the RAID 10. Before setup, I ran some fairly basic testing and a CrystalDisk benchmark on all drives before starting the process, to get a baseline. REFERENCE TEST Just as a quick comparison, I also ran CrystalDiskMark on the OS SSD, so you can see the performance of that. I didn't run any other tests. STANDALONE DRIVES First, I ran CrystalDisk Mark version 6.0.1 x64 on all four drives: As you can see, they're all relatively comparable, with Drive 2 doing better overall, and Drive 4 performing worst. Next I transferred a Hyper-V VM file to each of the disks. I used this test to get a real-world example of write speeds. I found the following: Drive 1: 132 - 147MB/s AVG: 139.5 Drive 2: 141 - 154MB/s AVG: 147.5 Drive 3: 137 - 145MB/s AVG: 141 Drive 4: 122 - 144MB/s AVG: 133 As you can see, the max speeds roughly match the max speeds from the CrystalDisk Mark test, so looking good so far! Next, using a Windows 10 ISO file (3.46GB) on the OS SSD, I copied the file 3 times, to, and then from each drive, to get a rough estimation of the time taken to read and write files. Each test was performed 3 times, and the below value is an average for each: Drive 1: 15.2s Write, 13.7s Read Drive 2: 14.4s Write, 13.2s Read Drive 3: 14.8s Write, 18.8s Read Drive 4: 16.2s Write, 13.8s Read Finally, again using the Windows 10 ISO file, I looked at the average response time in Task Manager when copying the file across, again 3 times, with the average result below: Drive 1: 488.3ms Drive 2: 484.0ms Drive 3: 490.3ms Drive 4: 487.3ms MIRRORED DRIVES Next up, I mirrored the four drives into 2 two-way mirrors (Drive 1 & 2, and Drive 3 & 4), and ran all the same tests, so i'll be lighter this time: CrystalDiskMark Mirror 1 seems to have the high and low values of the two drives for the Sequential test. Mirror 2 seems to follow this pattern. For both mirrors 4KiB Q8T8 test, 4KiB Q32T1 test seemed improved over the single drive performance numbers. For 4KiB Q1T1, only the Write seemed marginally improved, while the Read suffered in both cases. Speed copying Hyper-V VM Mirror 1: 131 - 144MB/s AVG: 137.5 (Drive 1 & 2 speeds from earlier average = 143.5) Mirror 2: 121 - 140MB/s AVG: 130.5 (Drive 3 & 4 speeds from earlier average = 137) Mirror 1 performs better, and Mirror 2 lags behind a bit in performance, but it does have the slower drive in it's mirror. Read / Write test for Windows 10 ISO Mirror 1: 15.9s Write, 13.4s Read Mirror 2: 16.1s Write, 14.8s Read So again, not far off the scores from the original standalone tests. Average Response Times Mirror 1: 488.0ms Mirror 2: 498.3ms Again, a comparable score. Overall, my experience from using Storage spaces to mirror the drives is that there is very little overhead, and the mirror performs in a comparable fashion to the disks it is made up of. SOFTWARE RAID 10 So we're finally here! The reasoning for all the previous test was to establish a baseline in performance, from disk to disk, to mirror to mirror, to see what kind of impact putting the two mirrors in a striped array would have. CrystalDiskMark In Sequential tests, we're seeing about the coupled performance of Mirror 1 and Mirror 2 from the previous set of results, great! For 4KiB Q8T8 and 4KiB Q32T1 Reads, were seeing slightly less than double the performance, but it's still and increase, but Writes seem to cope better here. 4KiB Q1T1 had the worst performance for Reads, barely increasing from the speed in either of the mirrors, but for Writes, not far off double again. Speed copying Hyper-V VM RAID10: 170 - 270MB/s AVG: 220 Quite a large fluctuation in this test,but, compared to all other results, even the lower speed is higher than the maximum speed achieved, and the maximum is not quite double that of the highest score. However, 220MB/s is still 72.5MB/s more than the fastest average speed previously seen. Read / Write test for Windows 10 ISO RAID10: 11.7s Write, 16.0s Read By far the fastest write speed we've seen so far, so the RAID 10 is coming into it's own. Obviously it's not half, but, faster is faster right? Compared to the fastest score of 14.4s from a standalone disk, this performs 23% faster. However, read speeds were nothing to write home about. Maybe this will be explained next... Average Response Times RAID10: 2411.7ms Now this is interesting. I'm in no way an expert, but this response time is MASSIVE in comparison to the ~500ms Max we were seeing beforehand. Maybe this is a consequence of the striping, or in particular because of the RAID 10. Perhaps this is contributing to the slow Read speeds observed in the previous result. However, our speeds aren't too bad, so maybe it's nothing to be concerned about, so long as you're only using it as storage, and not using it to run anything off of! OVERALL Overall, I think it's safe to say that, if you're not concerned about super speed (I mean, you're likely using slow HDDs!), but want a RAID which gives you redundancy, as well as a slight speed increase, then this is a viable option for you, which doesn't involve any tweaking or hacking, messing around in the UEFI (Or BIOS if it's that old!) (also, FAKE RAID!, seems to be a popular term), or involve buying an expensive Hardware card (which do have their benefits, but not so much on the cheap end). Perhaps running this with a newer CPU and chipset which isn't 5+ years old from an era where AMD were lagging behind in performance, maybe our numbers would have been better. But for my purposes, it works, and I'm happy with it. SOFTWARE RAID 10 RESILIENCY Now this last part is an added bonus, because I wanted to share my experience, and I hope that people will see this post and it be useful, as I'm trying to fill a gap in the internet with regards to this specific topic! I knew how RAID 10 worked, in theory, but I wanted to test it out. So, to that end, I put my Hyper-V VM on the RAID 10 array, shutdown the PC, and pulled Drive 1. Upon restart, the Logical volume was still there in Windows Explorer, and the VM on it ran just fine, no corruption! However, there are NO prompts by Storage Spaces that a drive has failed or is missing, so be aware of that. I took a look at Storage Spaces, and it did recognise the missing drive, and warned of decreased resiliency. Next, I shut it down again, and pulled Drive 3. This means I have pulled one drive from both parts of the RAID 1 array, leaving a single disk in each, which are RAIDed together, bascially running in RAID 0 now. Again, the drive showed up fine, and the VM ran fine. Next, I kind of knew what to expect, but I pulled Drive 4, and plugged Drive 1 back in, meaning I had 1 Mirror, but missing the 2nd Mirror. This is where it was borked. The drive failed to show in Windows Explorer. So i checked Disk Management, and it showed the Mirror as being missing, and the Dynamic disks as being offline. Now, I didn't go through the trouble of reformatting the unplugged drives, and populating them back in after this, so this next bit IS NOT representative, but I plugged Drive 3 and 4 back in, and started up, and the RAID 10 drive was back. As far as I'm aware, in case of a real drive failure, you would need to "remove" the failed drive from Storage Spaces first, then replace the physical drive, then add it back to the pool of the Mirror. I can't confirm this, as I did not test it. FINAL THOUGHTS I hope this is useful to someone, and I hope someone else can fill me in on their experience of Software RAID 10 in Windows. Cheers!

so i have a new build with AMD Ryzen 7 1800x MSI GTX 1050 Ti ASRock AB350 Pro 4 MB 120 GB M.2 NVMe with the OS 4 2TB HDDs that i want to set up in RAID 10 so... I successfully RAID 10'd them in the bios ( and switched back to SATA mode before you ask) they don't show up in windows besides in the disk manager where they show as normal partitions and not as striped or mirrored drives. these do NOT show up in windows file explorer. I tried downloading the AMD RAID Driver and RAIDXpert utility ver:17.40_RAIDXpert from the ASRock website and AMD but both gives me this error: OS is booted on NVMe volume and upgrading the driver will make the drive unbootable; so aborting the installation. I've tried everything i can think of guys! please help?

Hey guys, i would like to move my Raid 10 Array from my old PC to my new one. I already know that you can migrate Raid arrays that were created with Intels onboard Raid controller and i also already tested it with another Raid 1 array and this worked flawlessly. So i moved my 4 drives to the new PC and did the same as with the test Raid i tried earlier but now only 2 drives are detected as a part of a Raid array. The other 2 are just "non-Raid Disks". Does someone know how to fix that? The new motherboard is a Asus Maximus X Hero, the old one is a Asus P8P67 Deluxe. The drives are 4 x 6 TB WD REDs.

So I wanted to bounce something off the group.... In our research lab, we're currently setting up a private micro-HPC environment due to some functionality issues with our university's central HPC cluster. We deal with very large volumes of raw genomic data, which is both extremely data-dense and resource-intensive to process. Based on our computing needs (which is highly parallelized), we have specced out 4x [2x 32-core Epyc] Thinkmate servers (256 cores total), each linked through 40Gb QSPF+ (via a top-of-rack switch) to 2x 36-drive Thinkmate storage servers. Each storage server will be filled to capacity with 12 TB drives in RAID 10, for a useable-storage total of ~216 TB each (I should note that these will contain distinct data sets, so we do not intend to cluster them). The type of data analysis we do is extremely I/O intensive, and as such RAID 10 is the obvious choice for us (also for the ability to rebuild quickly in event of drive failure is imperative). What isn't so obvious for us is how well the RAID 10 will scale in terms of read/write performance. "In theory" my understanding is that it should scale more-or-less linearly (R:N & W:N/2) (i.e. so given each enterprise drive maxes out at about ~250MB/s, we would pretty much just saturate the 40Gb QSPF+ links at a sustained read/write speed of 4.5-5GB/s). So my question is, for people who have experience building large RAID 10 arrays, how well do read/write speeds actually scale? Are my estimates way off from real-world? (and for that matter, how good is real-world 40Gbe throughput performance?) The other option we are considering is adding ~8TB NVMe SSDs to each server to act as local scratches, but that obviously would grossly increase our costs.

Hello, I would like to setup a combination of HDD and SSD in my pc and I am wondering what the best way to do that would be. I want an SSD for the OS and another for Battlefield4 and Ark. For the rest of my data I want to use one or more HDDs. My question is what is the best way to set it up, I've heard about setting up a Raid and using the drives externally. Could I setup the data I want on the drives and plug them into a dock or would I be better off setting up a Raid? Also ate there other options?

Can we do apples to apples comparison of RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10? I'm a noob to this, It will be better if members here are little comprehensive. Thank you.

Theoretically for a large sample drive (for music software), what would be better? If I were to get 8x 1TB SSDs, should I get an LSI Raid card to deal with Raid 6 or 10 (I like the capacity of raid 6 but have seen that it could come with some cost too? something about calculation times etc?) Or, should I just get a SATA card (similar to a Raid card but without extensive raid functionality) and have an additional 8x SSDs in my computer, then spread my libraries out across these so that when I start a session I'm writing data to the RAM from multiple places. Would this still create data bottlenecks? Thanks

Basically I'm having a 4 x 2TB RAID 10 HDD array and want to know if I can also run a RAID 0 array with 2 SSDs off the same motherboard - the MSI X99A SLI Plus Thanks, James

Hi, so my girlfriends computer is running an SSD with the OS on it which seems to be working fine, but she also has 4 mechanical drives running in RAID 10. She turned her computer on today and they no longer show up in file explorer and don't seem to accessable. Applications stored on those drives won't run either. The drivers still show up in Device Manager but honestly I have no idea what has happened. The PC is running Windows 10. Any help super appreciated, I'm not really sure what other info to include.