What to do with 4 2.5' Drives

[TheRunningOtaku]

I have 4 2.5 inch 160GB Drives that I want to find a use for - they're all from old notebooks (2008-2014)

I'm planning to get the Gigabyte 990FX-UD3 later on in the year, and it supports RAID 0,1 and 5 (if I'm not wrong)

If I'm using it to store my Steam games and temporary video files when I digitize old tapes in the house (i.e. I can redownload them), would a RAID 0 of the drives be a good idea? I have an SSD but I'm trying to keep that clean.

[UltraNeonGaming]

I have 4 2.5 inch 160GB Drives that I want to find a use for - they're all from old notebooks (2008-2014)

I'm planning to get the Gigabyte 990FX-UD3 later on in the year, and it supports RAID 0,1 and 5 (if I'm not wrong)

If I'm using it to store my Steam games and temporary video files when I digitize old tapes in the house (i.e. I can redownload them), would a RAID 0 of the drives be a good idea? I have an SSD but I'm trying to keep that clean.

 

Give the drives to your good friend UltraNeonGaming

[UltraNeonGaming]

You've almost hit 500 posts, post some more stuff.

[UltraNeonGaming]

And on to answer your question, The drives are probably unreliable, just like any other "Old" laptop HDD, So if one fails, You'll have to download the games again. And I really don't know how performance will be, if it will be much better or hardly any, Because I have not had experience with RAID on HDD's, especially "Old" ones

[TheRunningOtaku]

And on to answer your question, The drives are probably unreliable, just like any other "Old" laptop HDD, So if one fails, You'll have to download the games again. And I really don't know how performance will be, if it will be much better or hardly any, Because I have not had experience with RAID on HDD's, especially "Old" ones

haha I think I've hit 500 with this post! :> speaking of it

I think I'll use them for recording and stuff - I have 1Gbps internet download, and my games are GMod, Minecraft, etc. One day of waiting for them to download won't hurt, especially if it saves me SGD$100 (I'm strapped for cash)

And I hate throwing old stuff away. 

The HDDs might be a bit slow to use for recording by themselves... Maybe a RAID 10?

[nekro]

Are all the same drives? Not a good idea to mix different drives on raid especially 2.5" in my opinion :-) One solution is to buy external usb 3 or usb 2 cases and stick the hdd when you need them so you have space inside the pc case without 4 sata and 4 power cables inside and no unnecessary power consumption or slow OS boot when they are ot connected :-)

1 gbit download? What kind of sorcery is this? :-o

[EmeraldFlame]

Since they are old laptop drives, I wouldn't count on them being reliable so at the very least I would be putting them in a RAID either a RAID 10 or RAID 5.

RAID 10 would likely give you better performance, unless you have a dedicated RAID card, as it has much less overhead. But raid 10 will also give you less space, you will only have 320GB of usable storage. Also with RAID 10, since all drives have an exact duplicate, if 1 drive fails, it will warn you, but just keep on trucking and using the other drive with no downtime.

RAID 5 would give you more space usable, 480GB, but would likely have lower performance for you as it requires a lot more CPU overhead for it to calculate parity data. A dedicated RAID card would probably actually make this the faster option though. Also if a drive were to die you would have some downtime as you would need to get a new drive and run the rebuild process.

[TheRunningOtaku]

Are all the same drives? Not a good idea to mix different drives on raid especially 2.5" in my opinion :-) One solution is to buy external usb 3 or usb 2 cases and stick the hdd when you need them so you have space inside the pc case without 4 sata and 4 power cables inside and no unnecessary power consumption or slow OS boot when they are ot connected :-)

1 gbit download? What kind of sorcery is this? :-o

They're all the same drives. I don't really care for the performance or the reliability it's more of a for-fun thing.

I have a budget of $0 for anything other than the Computer ^^' for now.

I live in Singapore! It's basically Manhattan in Asia. Everyone has access to Fibre if they want.

 

Since they are old laptop drives, I wouldn't count on them being reliable so at the very least I would be putting them in a RAID either a RAID 10 or RAID 5.

RAID 10 would likely give you better performance, unless you have a dedicated RAID card, as it has much less overhead. But raid 10 will also give you less space, you will only have 320GB of usable storage. Also with RAID 10, since all drives have an exact duplicate, if 1 drive fails, it will warn you, but just keep on trucking and using the other drive with no downtime.

RAID 5 would give you more space usable, 480GB, but would likely have lower performance for you as it requires a lot more CPU overhead for it to calculate parity data. A dedicated RAID card would probably actually make this the faster option though. Also if a drive were to die you would have some downtime as you would need to get a new drive and run the rebuild process.

hmm I think I'll go with RAID 10 then. But when 1 drive fails,  I won't be able to do that anymore  

(I guess the same goes with RAID 5, it'll have close to 0 storage)

maybe I'll do two RAID 0 arrays and back the stuff up to each other. 

It'll more or less be a scratch disk. Each drive has about 70mbps sequential and 0.3mbps 4k reads, so if I do 4 of them and make them do sequential writes(video recording), I should get about 240mbps, right there in SSD territory  (I don't have enough $$$ to run a RAMDisk)

[dalekphalm]

I have 4 2.5 inch 160GB Drives that I want to find a use for - they're all from old notebooks (2008-2014)

I'm planning to get the Gigabyte 990FX-UD3 later on in the year, and it supports RAID 0,1 and 5 (if I'm not wrong)

If I'm using it to store my Steam games and temporary video files when I digitize old tapes in the house (i.e. I can redownload them), would a RAID 0 of the drives be a good idea? I have an SSD but I'm trying to keep that clean.

 

I would recommend against RAID 0 for the drives, simply because if they are all used, then they could crap out on you at any time. While you take that risk literally anytime you use a mechanical HDD, RAID 0 is a bit too risky for my taste. If you have a single disk failure with RAID 0, then your entire RAID array is lost.

 

I would recommend going RAID 5 - which would give you the space of 3 out of the 4 drives, and protect against a single drive failure. If your motherboard supported RAID 10, then I would recommend that as well (can stand 2 drive failures - RAID 10 is striped and mirrored)

 

Alternatively I would recommend a software drive spanning technology like FlexRAID, etc.

[TheRunningOtaku]

I would recommend against RAID 0 for the drives, simply because if they are all used, then they could crap out on you at any time. While you take that risk literally anytime you use a mechanical HDD, RAID 0 is a bit too risky for my taste. If you have a single disk failure with RAID 0, then your entire RAID array is lost.

 

I would recommend going RAID 5 - which would give you the space of 3 out of the 4 drives, and protect against a single drive failure. If your motherboard supported RAID 10, then I would recommend that as well (can stand 2 drive failures - RAID 10 is striped and mirrored)

 

Alternatively I would recommend a software drive spanning technology like FlexRAID, etc.

I'm wondering right now that let's say I have a RAID 10 going, and my motherboard dies.

What happens to the array?

[EmeraldFlame]

hmm I think I'll go with RAID 10 then. But when 1 drive fails,  I won't be able to do that anymore  

(I guess the same goes with RAID 5, it'll have close to 0 storage)

maybe I'll do two RAID 0 arrays and back the stuff up to each other. 

It'll more or less be a scratch disk. Each drive has about 70mbps sequential and 0.3mbps 4k reads, so if I do 4 of them and make them do sequential writes(video recording), I should get about 240mbps, right there in SSD territory  (I don't have enough $$$ to run a RAMDisk)

 

Making two RAID 0's and backing them up to eachother is EXACTLY what raid 10 does. No reason to set it up to be manual like that when you can make it automatic. And actually with RAID 10, when 1 drive fails it will continue operating, it's just recommended you replace it, because if its sister drive also goes down, the data is gone. Also with raid 10 you wouldn't be looking at 240MBps performance, you would be more around 120-140ish. WIth raid 10 only 2 drives would be your hot drives, where as the other 2 are essentially mirrored spares. RAID 5 performance is really dependent on the controller.

 

I'm wondering right now that let's say I have a RAID 10 going, and my motherboard dies.

What happens to the array?

 

If the motherboard dies you could be sitting in a weird spot. Some raid chipsets play well with others and some don't. You may be able to plug it into another board and have it recognize, but the chances are slim. You wold probably have to find a board with the same model raid controller

[TheRunningOtaku]

Making two RAID 0's and backing them up to eachother is EXACTLY what raid 10 does. No reason to set it up to be manual like that when you can make it automatic. And actually with RAID 10, when 1 drive fails it will continue operating, it's just recommended you replace it, because if its sister drive also goes down, the data is gone. Also with raid 10 you wouldn't be looking at 240MBps performance, you would be more around 120-140ish. WIth raid 10 only 2 drives would be your hot drives, where as the other 2 are essentially mirrored spares. RAID 5 performance is really dependent on the controller.

 

 

If the motherboard dies you could be sitting in a weird spot. Some raid chipsets play well with others and some don't. You may be able to plug it into another board and have it recognize, but the chances are slim. You wold probably have to find a board with the same model raid controller

It's more of a case where most of the stuff on the drives (temporary video files and Steam games) are either temporary or easily replaced, so I don't mind losing them. (For the 240mbps I was talking about RAID0 across 4 drives)

RAID 10 would give me 320GB of reliable storage.

2xRAID0 would give me 640GB (honestly if I have files I want to keep I'll keep them on the SSD, or on the NAS which uses RAID1)

I'll also do regular backups to a NAS, for the files I want (also deals with the motherboard dying issue)

[565465464]

I would probably go for raid 6, then 2 drives can die and you still don't loose data.