8 SSD but which raid?

[cDNA]

Hello,

Im planning to build a quite good computer and i would like to use an 8 (or 6) SSD array. But i want it to be safe and i dont know if i should do a raid 5, 6 or 10.

I do plan on buying a controller card for this, and i will probably buy samsung 840 128Gb SSD.

Any recomendations?

On a completly different subject i was wondering (for curiosity purposes) if it is possible to use different levels of raid on top of each other. For exemple do a raid 5 on few drives then use two of this volume and do a raid 1 on top of the two raid 5. This is purely an hypothetical question i do not intend to do something like that!

[perplex]

i just watched the live stream and something like this came up. Linus said he should use RAID 6 if im not mistaken, so take that how you will, you could also check out the live steam that just happened, it was in the Q and A i think

[Guest]

What do you need such an expansive array for?

[cDNA]

What do you need such an expansive array for?

Lots of video editing, photoshop, 3D modelisation, awesomeness, massive files transfer, and other stuffs. Also, finally having storage that doesnt take 7 minutes to load a game....

[Lukiose]

RAID0 them all! And show us your read/write speeds

[cDNA]

i just watched the live stream and something like this came up. Linus said he should use RAID 6 if im not mistaken, so take that how you will, you could also check out the live steam that just happened, it was in the Q and A i think

He did talked about it but it doesnt give me much info on performance and reliability... plus he does daily backups. Which i might do on a monthly basis but thats an other subject.

Will a raid 6 be faster than a raid 10?

[cDNA]

RAID0 them all! And show us your read/write speeds

I will do a raid 0 to see the speeds and show it (i will do a build log because i have several ideas that i havent seen anywhere) but i wont keep a raid 0. I lost all my data on a laptop before and i do not want this to happen again...

[MathijsZ77]

RAID0 them all! And show us your read/write speeds

I was thinking exactly the same

[vkadurin]

RAID 10

[unidentical]

RAID 10 would be faster than 5, and six just offers more redundancy. 

 

So long as you're backing up to a NAS or something I'd say RAID 10

[dalekphalm]

He did talked about it but it doesnt give me much info on performance and reliability... plus he does daily backups. Which i might do on a monthly basis but thats an other subject.

Will a raid 6 be faster than a raid 10?

RAID 6 would be the most fault tolerant, since it could handle 2 drive failures, so I would recommend that to start.... but, to put it lightly, RAID is NOT a backup. RAID should be used for uptime and convenience (plus any performance bonuses).

 

If there is ANY important data on the array that you cannot live without, you should be backing it up (as frequently as new data arrives).

 

By this I mean, if within that month (your stated backup target), the data is relatively stagnant and doesn't change much (Like, a media server might be), then a monthly backup is totally fine. However, if you have new data on your array every week or even every day, then you need to keep your backup solution up to date as well. I know it sucks, but trust me, if you ever have a failure, you'll thank us later.

 

Imagine that you have a drive failure 29 days into the month, and the rebuild process fails (for whatever reason, it can happen). You'll have lost an entire months worth of data. Basically to determine how often to do a backup, think about how much data you can afford to lose (A days worth, vs a weeks worth, vs a months worth, and so on). If losing a months worth of data isn't that big of a deal, then monthly backups are safe.

 

I'm not saying you CAN'T do monthly backups, I'm just trying to impart how important backups are, even when using RAID 6. I (and the rest of us here) don't want you to go through the terrible pains of data loss, cause it suuuuuuuuucks.

 

Also, backups (nightly, weekly, whatever) can be automated to an external USB drive or NAS extremely easily using lots of different software. I personally like Acronis, but there are tons of good ones. I personally backup my desktop nightly to a WHS 2011 server.

[cDNA]

RAID 6 would be the most fault tolerant, since it could handle 2 drive failures, so I would recommend that to start.... but, to put it lightly, RAID is NOT a backup. RAID should be used for uptime and convenience (plus any performance bonuses).

 

If there is ANY important data on the array that you cannot live without, you should be backing it up (as frequently as new data arrives).

 

By this I mean, if within that month (your stated backup target), the data is relatively stagnant and doesn't change much (Like, a media server might be), then a monthly backup is totally fine. However, if you have new data on your array every week or even every day, then you need to keep your backup solution up to date as well. I know it sucks, but trust me, if you ever have a failure, you'll thank us later.

 

Imagine that you have a drive failure 29 days into the month, and the rebuild process fails (for whatever reason, it can happen). You'll have lost an entire months worth of data. Basically to determine how often to do a backup, think about how much data you can afford to lose (A days worth, vs a weeks worth, vs a months worth, and so on). If losing a months worth of data isn't that big of a deal, then monthly backups are safe.

 

I'm not saying you CAN'T do monthly backups, I'm just trying to impart how important backups are, even when using RAID 6. I (and the rest of us here) don't want you to go through the terrible pains of data loss, cause it suuuuuuuuucks.

 

Also, backups (nightly, weekly, whatever) can be automated to an external USB drive or NAS extremely easily using lots of different software. I personally like Acronis, but there are tons of good ones. I personally backup my desktop nightly to a WHS 2011 server.

thanks for the post, made me think quite a bit. my original thought was that with a raid 10 i could have beetwen 1 and 4 drives failure (in the best/worse case) and still be able to rebuild it. also it's SSDs so safer than HDD but maybe i should do a raid 5 or 6 and back it up more frequently. i dont mind buying HDD for storage, especially that i could just have 2 or 3 an alternate which one i do backups on. (i rarely regret deleting a file, i always make sure i will never use it again).

but if i do more frequent backups then maybe i dont need a redondant array..... hum now you gave me even more questions than i had before! i will dig a bit more into this, i dont want to regret my choice. 

[looney]

RAID 6 speeds largely depend on the RAID controller, it needs to calculate all the parity packets. 

For your use scenario i would use RAID 10, you will lose more storage space on redundancy then you would with RAID 6 but in most cases is will be faster and its more reliable/redundant.

 

But don´t forget RAID is not a Backup, always backup your RAID arrays.