Raid 0 Or Not ??

[Winther]

Hey guys!

 

I have hardware coming for my upcoming home server. I have mainly large video files on my drives. My question is if I should use my 2x3TB WD Red drives in raid 0, I also have 2x2TB WD RE4 drives that im considering raid 0'ing. This will be software raid, done by the motherboard.

 

Redundancy is not really of concern here, speed is, but I dont really know if its needed for my usage scenario.

[nishank93]

They're enterprise grade drives. I don't expect them to fail (unless you're really unlucky). Backup the really important stuff, and RAID 0 them! I would recommend getting  RAID card (expensive!) as software RAID can be slow, but I'm not sure whether this applies to a couple of RAID 0 set-ups.

[orangecat]

I would not because your going to be limited on preformance by your network rather then the drives and if its just for videos don't bother with RAID 0. I hope you don't put family pictures or videos on a RAID 0.

[Winther]

All the data that would be put on the drives would not be important to me, just storage.

 

But I think I will just raid alone and use them without.

[Nit3Rid3R]

It's a home server, I don't see why you want to Raid 0 it. You're going to be limited to the network speed when you transfer files back and forth.

[KyonCoraeL]

I would also note that raid 0 isn't worth the hassle when one hard drive fails, but I agree with everyone else that network would limit your raid 0 performance.

[Eric1024]

No no no no no no don't do raid 0.

 

You may not think redundancy is an issue but when a drive goes out, and you loose ALL your data, you're going to wish you had gone with raid 1/5. And trust me, a drive will die at some point. There is no situation at any time ever where you should be implementing raid 0 unless you have the data backed up in another location. Basically raid 0 is a ticking time bomb. Furthermore, unless you have a home network that's faster than 1gigabit, you're not going to be able to take advantage of anything greater than the speed of somewhat slow drive. 

 

They're enterprise grade drives. I don't expect them to fail (unless you're really unlucky). Backup the really important stuff, and RAID 0 them! I would recommend getting  RAID card (expensive!) as software RAID can be slow, but I'm not sure whether this applies to a couple of RAID 0 set-ups.

Also, @nishank93, I don't mean to be disrespectful but a lot of this is misinformation. Just because a drive is labeled "enterprise" doesn't mean it won't fail. Enterprise drives are more reliable, but they're not a silver bullet by any means. They extra money you're paying for them is really just for enterprise level support as well as a few enterprise features (TLER / ERC) that are starting to show up on consumer drives anyway.

 

Furthermore, you don't need a raid card for the lower raid levels (0/1), particularly when you're only using a few drives, as raid 0 and 1 are not computationally intensive at all, especially when you're only using 2 or 3 drives. Only when you're using raid with parity (raid 5 and especially raid 6) should you really be using a dedicated controller, and even then, raid 5 can be handled just fine with onboard raid unless you want to use a lot of drives.

 

Your best options are probably:

A: A raid 1 virtual drive made up of two matching drives (the reds would be more than sufficient)

B: get a third WD red and make a raid 5 virtual drive (or do this with the enterprise drives, though personally I think that's a bit of a waste of money)

C: Use all four drives with something like flexRAID with single parity to get the maximum capacity out of the whole array.

[nishank93]

Also, @nishank93, I don't mean to be disrespectful but a lot of this is misinformation. Just because a drive is labeled "enterprise" doesn't mean it won't fail. Enterprise drives are more reliable, but they're not a silver bullet by any means. They extra money you're paying for them is really just for enterprise level support as well as a few enterprise features (TLER / ERC) that are starting to show up on consumer drive anyway.

I didn't mean to say they will not fail, I meant they are less likely (they have hardware level changes that, as you said, make them more reliable). I apologise to anyone who read that as they cannot fail.

[Eric1024]

I didn't mean to say they will not fail, I meant they are less likely (they have hardware level changes that, as you said, make them more reliable). I apologise to anyone who read that as they cannot fail.

It's all good :P I just wanted to make sure OP or anyone else reading this understood that.