RAID 0 & 10 Questions.

[Cavalry Canuck]

Looking to swap my storage setup from a 128gb Samsung 850 boot drive + 500gb WD Blue storage drive to a RAID 0 setup with three 500gb Samsung 860 drives. Running out of room with the current format, and these drives are getting quite old (6 years). Also hoping to get quicker read/write times, though that isn’t the main goal.

 

What’s the best way to go about this? Can I simply add the new drives, set them up the RAID 0, and copy over from my old drives?

 

System is based on an MSI Z87-GD65 Gaming mobo with a 4790k. No NVME for me.

 

My system has room for at least 6 SSDs. Down the road when I have some extra bling, how easy would it be to purchase three more drives, and convert from a three-drive RAID 0 setup to a six-drive RAID 10 setup? Would all the drives need to be exactly the same make and model, or would there be room for variance (ie, including the old 500gb card alongside the new Samsung 860s?).

 

Final questions on drive selection. As I intend on RAID 10 down the road, will I be just fine with Samsung 860 Evos, or should I pay the premium for the Pros anyway? Should I consider even more capacity? If so, would that make Pros a more logical option for longevity? Any other drives that you would be willing to suggest in place of these options? 

 

Thanks for your time,

Matthew

[Windows7ge]

RAID10 would offer you some protection if you don't mind losing 50% of the usable storage but if you plan on using motherboard RAID I wouldn't. Invest in something like an LSI controller.

 

Mixing disks is fine. It's just the slowest disk will dictate the effective speed of all the others.

 

Personally I wouldn't go with consumer SSD's here at all. I'd go with something like the Intel D3-S4XXX SSD's. Made for the enterprise space with more though to MTBF as oppose to raw performance. You may need to research TRIM/Garbage Collection. I don't know if RAID still causes issues with this and SSDs or if solutions have been found.

[Cavalry Canuck]

7 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

RAID10 would offer you some protection if you don't mind losing 50% of the usable storage but if you plan on using motherboard RAID I wouldn't. Invest in something like an LSI controller.

 

Mixing disks is fine. It's just the slowest disk will dictate the effective speed of all the others.

 

Personally I wouldn't go with consumer SSD's here at all. I'd go with something like the Intel D3-S4XXX SSD's. Made for the enterprise space with more though to MTBF as oppose to raw performance. You may need to research TRIM/Garbage Collection. I don't know if RAID still causes issues with this and SSDs or if solutions have been found.

What’s wrong with using the mobo  for RAID 10? 

 

Thanks for the other info. Gives me more to look into.

[Kilrah]

13 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I don't know if RAID still causes issues with this and SSDs or if solutions have been found.

Actually Intel RST supports TRIM and access to every drive's SMART data etc so it is sometimes better to use motherboard RAID for that instead of a cheapo dedicated controller that doesn't support all of that. It's really no worse than a decent dedicated solution nowadays. 

Latest LTT video suggests it's not that rosy on the AMD side, but Intel works just fine.

[Windows7ge]

15 minutes ago, Cavalry Canuck said:

What’s wrong with using the mobo  for RAID 10? 

 

Thanks for the other info. Gives me more to look into.

Motherboard RAID isn't good. One big reason is the array isn't importable. If you change out the motherboard for something new you can't. If the motherboard dies you have to source an identical motherboard with the same chipset RAID controller otherwise you have to start over.

 

With a dedicated controller like from LSI you can import arrays if the card fails by just picking up another and if you change motherboards it doesn't matter.

[Windows7ge]

16 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Actually Intel RST supports TRIM and access to every drive's SMART data etc so it is sometimes better to use motherboard RAID for that instead of a cheapo dedicated controller that doesn't support all of that. It's really no worse than a decent dedicated solution nowadays. 

Latest LTT video suggests it's not that rosy on the AMD side, but Intel works just fine.

I'd still go the dedicated controller route but most definitely not a cheapo card. Get something from LSI like the 9211-8i.

[Kilrah]

5 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Motherboard RAID isn't good. One big reason is the array isn't importable

That's not correct. 

If you have a board with Intel RST, which basically is any Intel board for the last at least 6 years it works just the same and will see an array made on another one straight away.

[Windows7ge]

12 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

That's not correct. 

If you have a board with Intel RST, which basically is any Intel board for the last at least 6 years it works just the same and will see an array made on another one straight away.

I don't have extensive enough knowledge on Intel RST to argue you. Stating what I know based on what I've learned from others. Personally even if Intel RST is more than capable assuming OP is using an Intel motherboard I still wouldn't use the motherboard RAID just out of preference. I don't like the idea of tying the RAID to a non-removable component. This just means more headache for me if the board were to fail. Meanwhile, using a good PCI_e RAID controller. Pop out the mother, pop another in, switch to AMD if you like, won't matter the RAID is still working fine.

 

You could say though that I'm a little biased because I'm a server platform aficionado.

[Cavalry Canuck]

17 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I don't have extensive enough knowledge on Intel RST to argue you. Stating what I know based on what I've learned from others. Personally even if Intel RST is more than capable assuming OP is using an Intel motherboard I still wouldn't use the motherboard RAID just out of preference. I don't like the idea of tying the RAID to a non-removable component. This just means more headache for me if the board were to fail. Meanwhile, using a good PCI_e RAID controller. Pop out the mother, pop another in, switch to AMD if you like, won't matter the RAID is still working fine.

 

You could say though that I'm a little biased because I'm a server platform aficionado.

I listed my board and cpu in the original post. It’s a z87 system.

 

I’m going to go the SLI route. The board only has 16 PCIe lanes. I’m concerned that a PCIe controller would hamper performance.

 

 

 

Anyway, I initially plan on going RAID 0 to begin with, and buy extra drives for a RAID 10 setup in a year or two. How difficult is it to migrate from a RAID 0 setup to a RAID 10 setup, whether it be with the integrated controller or the PCIe controller?

[Cavalry Canuck]

50 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

That's not correct. 

If you have a board with Intel RST, which basically is any Intel board for the last at least 6 years it works just the same and will see an array made on another one straight away.

Let’s suppose for a moment that Windows7ge is correct, or that I migrate to an AMD system next. 

 

Could I not just use a 7th drive to boot, and then using the original 6 drives from the first RAID 10 array, set up the “new” array with the new board’s integrated controller?

[Windows7ge]

18 minutes ago, Cavalry Canuck said:

I’m going to go the SLI route. The board only has 16 PCIe lanes. I’m concerned that a PCIe controller would hamper performance.

That could be problematic.

 

25 minutes ago, Cavalry Canuck said:

Anyway, I initially plan on going RAID 0 to begin with, and buy extra drives for a RAID 10 setup in a year or two. How difficult is it to migrate from a RAID 0 setup to a RAID 10 setup, whether it be with the integrated controller or the PCIe controller?

I don't know with 100% certainty but it'd go one of two ways.

1. It gives you the option to mirror the RAID after it's made.
2. You have to destroy the RAID losing everything then make the RAID10.

[DailyProcrastinator]

I personally use Raid 10 just for the added protection, as I have had drive failures in the past, but that means you sacrifice half your storage space. So, in my scenario I use 4x 8TB drives but really only have 16TB of usable storage, but I have the benefits of faster read/writes (Raid 0) and the protection of data redundancy (Raid 1). However, this is not a substitute for backing up your data, if that Raid partition fails somehow, it could, at the very least corrupt all the data, which is a costly repair. So if the data is extremely important you still should consider backing it up. 

 

Raid 10 is also best for 4x drive configs at a minimum.

 

I use Windows Storage spaces, not everyone's favorite, but for 1 key reason, now that I have my Raid config in an external enclosure (no longer in my server) using Windows Storage Spaces basically makes it plug-and-play. Meaning I can plug it into any PC and it shows up like and normal single hard-drive instantly, with the added value of not relying on crappy Raid controllers. 

[Kilrah]

10 hours ago, Cavalry Canuck said:

Anyway, I initially plan on going RAID 0 to begin with, and buy extra drives for a RAID 10 setup in a year or two. How difficult is it to migrate from a RAID 0 setup to a RAID 10 setup, whether it be with the integrated controller or the PCIe controller?

You'll have to move everything off of the RAID0 onto other drives and recreate the whole from scratch.

 

Agree that RAID10 is kinda deprecated nowadays, better to use RAID5 unless you have a really particular reason.

 

And have a backup of course regardless of what RAID you're using. If you're not going to be able to afford a backup in addition to your RAID10 then you should rather use the drives as a separate backup for the RAID0 instead of making a RAID10.