Fake Raid vs Hw Raid for my use

[Substance]

I have this following hardware I want to use as a plex/media server. The motherboard has 6 sata ports and raid support (probably sw). I am looking for raid 0 only for speed and maximum size. 

 

Asus Tuf z270 mk I

i7- 7700k 5GHz

Quadro 4000

6x 12tb hdd

Windows server 2019

 

Would I benefit from a HW Raid controller card? 

 

[Shimejii]

Raid 0 is not worth using for media server use, or most uses as just one failure, power failure and such can cause an entire raid 0 array to get corrupted.

[MarbleHornets]

1 minute ago, Shimejii said:

Raid 0 is not worth using for media server use, or most uses as just one failure, power failure and such can cause an entire raid 0 array to get corrupted.

I agree there, especially if you're going to populate all 6 drives, that gives you a pretty high possibility of failure and then the rest of your drives are pretty sol. But i'd say to go with a raid card, it'll be a a better system and if your raid card stops working for some reason, it's an easier fix to replace the card compared to the whole motherboard.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Unless you're serving a lot of people at once, you don't need a lot of speed for a media server either.  You'll likely run out of network bandwidth before you cap the drive's performance on a sustained read.

[Substance]

Do you recommend none Raid and spread the media to 6 separate local discs on the system?

[kirashi]

45 minutes ago, Substance said:

I have this following hardware I want to use as a plex/media server. The motherboard has 6 sata ports and raid support (probably sw). I am looking for raid 0 only for speed and maximum size. 

 

Asus Tuf z270 mk I

i7- 7700k 5GHz

Quadro 4000

6x 12tb hdd

Windows server 2019

 

Would I benefit from a HW Raid controller card? 

 

Personally, I'd just use software RAID, in addition to good backups. Something like StableBit DrivePool lets you pool drives together into a RAID 1 / 0 array, 1 being for write, and 0 being for read. This stripes your data for redundancy while also allowing read striping for speed, and the best part is that if one drive dies, you don't have to rebuild anything because unlike other drive pooling software, your drives are still fully readable and not using a filesystem that can't be read from any computer.

 

That being all said, if you really want to build a media server, I highly recommend getting enough resources together to run FreeNAS and ZFS, as this is a far better solution than anything Windows Server can provide.

[Substance]

I won’t have any important data on this system. Basically my entire physical movie collection ripped into hdds and I will keep the actual physical media. In case of a drive failure, I will have to rip the entire collection again. It would take me so many hours to do it again but at least I have some sort of a back up.

 

 

Pretty much, I need a lot of space, decent speed and relatively moderate reliability. 

 

To increase reliability, I can consider SW Raid 5 or add a Raid controller and 2 additional drives for Raid 10 (8x 12 TB  total). Both options I lose disc space.