Which RAID for Gaming?

[SM0R3S]

I am getting an Intel RS3DC080 RAID card and eight HAS rated HDDs that are 7200RPM with 128cache. I will be using this setup for gaming as well as storing photos, videos, music, and documents, but mainly used for gaming. I have researched a lot and some have said to use RAID 5 for five HDDs and RAID 6 with more than five HDDs. RAID 10 if you use four HDDs. RAID 0 if you don't care about your data.  Which would be the most ideal setup for this using RAID and has anyone ran any testing on this?

[Electronics Wizardy]

How many drives? Really I'd just get a single big drive for most uses. Also is get a lsi Controller as that Intel card us just rebranded lsi. 

[Anghammarad]

Go for Raid 5. 8 Disks are optimum for Raid 5. 

 

You lose one disk of sotrage space though for Parity.

[glitchmaster0001]

RAID 5 seems to be the best solution for your needs. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Also why do you need a raid card? Id just use software raid in windows.

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Also why do you need a raid card? Id just use software raid in windows.

Software Parity RAID in Windows (Meaning, Storage Spaces w/ a Parity pool) has very slow writes, compared to a hardware RAID card. You can add an SSD cache and performance will be massively improved, but if he's mostly just installing games? The cost of an SSD will offset any savings from getting rid of the RAID card.

 

Also, LSI vs Intel? If he's getting the Intel card for a good deal (used, or just super cheap new), then there's no reason not to. It'll work just as well as a properly branded LSI card. And it's a SAS3108 chipset, which is newer and has a faster 12Gbps SAS interface on it.

 

He could go with a cheaper and older model, or course - anything with a SAS2008 chipset is generally a good buy.

[Ildiesalot]

DO NOT GO RAID 5!

 

At least go with raid 6, and personally for that many drives I would go with raid 10. Are you going to be writing to the array often or just read (such as in games)? If it's just read, then raid 6 would probably be enough.

 

Yes, RAID 5's 1 disk redundancy is fine for 99% of the time. The problem is when that 1 drive fails, if the disks are >1TB the rebuild process is going to be extremely long and taxing on the remaining drives. If the any of the rest of your drives are having any problems at all, they are likely to fail during the rebuild, and you lose everything. Including the photos, videos, music, and documents.

 

RAID 10's rebuilt process is quite a bit quicker, as well as less stressful, and in general you'll see better performance as well. Unfortunately, you'd get 50% of your raw space, compared to the 75% with RAID 6. How big are the drives you're planning to use?

[scottyseng]

On ‎7‎/‎13‎/‎2017 at 10:13 AM, SM0R3S said:

-snip-

Well, this is pretty much just a rebranded LSI 9361-8i. Make sure you get the CacheVault battery for it. A SAS3 gen RAID card is kind of overkill for eight drives, but I guess it makes you future proof for a while.

 

I vote for RAID6. You only need a min of 4 drives for RAID6 and a min of 3 for RAID5. I used to use RAID10, but I switched to RAID6 per leadeater's recommendation. There are advantages to RAID6 for LSI RAID cards. Only RAID 5 / 6 are expandable (you can expand the array without having to remake a whole new array). You can lose any two drives with RAID6 vs the correct two with RAID10. Downsides though, RAID5 and 6 do have a bit of overhead, but in my experience, the sequential speed is faster than RAID10. Random IO is slower than RAID10 (But it's going to be terrible with hard drives either way...at least compared to a SSD). As mentioned above, RAID 5 / 6 has the longest rebuild time (Though I have yet to complain, the rebuild times aren't too bad for me...I've rebuilt around 3 times already and it took around 8 hours. (Never again with refurbished drives)). I have 10 4TB WD Re SAS and 6 4TB WD Reds. The WD Re (7200RPM) do rebuild faster than the Red array (Even when they were both six drives each)

 

RAID10 does have the faster random IO due to not having to write parity and a fast rebuild time (It just has to copy / paste from the other drive. You lose half the space though.

 

It's a bit tough since you plan to game from this...which is a lot of small files usually. Hard drives don't particularly excel at this, but if you get the LSI battery, you can get the RAID card memory to act as a small buffer for you. I personally think LSI's SSD cache system, CacheCade 2.0, (Which you have to buy separately) is a bit too expensive for what it is. One SSD will run over a small hard drive array for random small IO, but it depends on what kind of sized files your games are.

 

Ah, here's what eight 4TB WD Re SAS drives get in RAID6 (Back when my array was empty):