raid card choice

[SxMAC]

Hey, I'm basically looking to have super mas storage in my pc, but I wan it safe as possible, I plan on having 5 4tb WD red hard drives with 2 120 Kingston hyper x SSD's. I want a good raid card around 200-300 dollars. Can you run 2 different types of raid off one raid controller?? And what raid card do you recommend. I'd like to run the HDDs in rAid 5. And the SSDs I'm not too sure, probably raid 1. I also plan on having a small 60gb ssd just for the OS. So I don't have to run the OS in rAid 1.

My other question is even with a fairly high end raid controller will I really notice a difference just watching movies and listening to music if the data is stored in rAid 5. Like, I hear it's slower but just how much slower is it?

[AMICLG]

First, no you can't run multiple Raid types of a single card also you have to have all the same drives. Second, you would just run the SSDs on the raid controller either on the CPU or motherboard depending on what hardware you have but I would just get a single 128Gb SSD and don't keep and important data on it if your worried. Third, Raid 5 is pretty slow on the writes, and is really dependent on the drives you have and the Raid controller. I would recommend using Raid 10 which stripes the data a cross half the drives so you have the speed of Raid 0 and mirrors the other half so you have the safety of Raid 1 and on a good Raid card their is little to no overhead. The only problem with this is that you only get the storage of half of your drives and you'd have to get 6 drives in your case also the minimum number drives required to run Raid 10 is 4 and there has to be an even amount of drives. Forth, there won't be too much of a difference with Raid 5 but with Raid 10 on 6 drives there will be a difference in transferring data from the SSD to the Raid array. If you have any more questions I'll try to answer them the best I can.

[wpirobotbuilder]

My other question is even with a fairly high end raid controller will I really notice a difference just watching movies and listening to music if the data is stored in rAid 5. Like, I hear it's slower but just how much slower is it?

RAID 5 has low random performance numbers, and it's on the order of 1 MB/s. It's much better for sequential operations, like watching a movie.

 

You shouldn't have much trouble unless you're watching high-res raw footage, which can be several gigabytes per minute. Then it will depend on the speed of your drives.