New RAID Advice

Sullivang24 · April 11

Okay so I have 5 12tb seagate HDD that I am looking to create a raid with. I am a professional filmmaker and shoot R3D so I need a lot of storage, but I also need redundancy and safety for my clients.

i bought a USB3.1 5 bay enclosure with hopes of using that with Softraid(keep in mind I pretty much have no idea what I’m doing and these choices are largely guesses).

so I created the raid and started transferring data onto it and pretty immediately I realized the data it was copying was all corrupted, or partial files. On top of that disks were disconnected from the raid but not the actual computer, I could see and interact with them in Disk Manager, but I could not get them to relink with the raid, meaning I lost a 1/5th of my data capacity and lost speed.
I honestly don’t know what the culprit of this is, if it’s the software or the enclosure.

regardless, I need to find a safe and reliable solution yesterday. Should I just get a raid controller and put the HDDs in my computer case(has 10 bays already).

will this give me the performance and reliable I need? If I go this route, what card should I get and do I then need to get a raid software to manage it? If so, what do you recommend?

and yes, I would like to edit off this raid volume, speed is important. I’d like to do raid 5 or 10.

Blue4130 · April 11

45 minutes ago, Sullivang24 said:

Okay so I have 5 12tb seagate HDD that I am looking to create a raid with. I am a professional filmmaker and shoot R3D so I need a lot of storage, but I also need redundancy and safety for my clients.

i bought a USB3.1 5 bay enclosure with hopes of using that with Softraid(keep in mind I pretty much have no idea what I’m doing and these choices are largely guesses).

so I created the raid and started transferring data onto it and pretty immediately I realized the data it was copying was all corrupted, or partial files. On top of that disks were disconnected from the raid but not the actual computer, I could see and interact with them in Disk Manager, but I could not get them to relink with the raid, meaning I lost a 1/5th of my data capacity and lost speed.
I honestly don’t know what the culprit of this is, if it’s the software or the enclosure.

regardless, I need to find a safe and reliable solution yesterday. Should I just get a raid controller and put the HDDs in my computer case(has 10 bays already).

will this give me the performance and reliable I need? If I go this route, what card should I get and do I then need to get a raid software to manage it? If so, what do you recommend?

and yes, I would like to edit off this raid volume, speed is important. I’d like to do raid 5 or 10.

Loosing 1/5 of your capacity is standard for raid 5, that 1/5th is the parity space. For your situation, I'd absolutely put the drives internal. I've heard way too many horror stories about those multidrive raid boxes.

BUT i'd also make sure that I had proper backups, not just relying on the raid. We all know the saying, so I won't say it again. But if you want security of data, have multiple copies.

tkitch · April 11

RAID 10 is stupid. Don't do it.

You want RAID 5 (single parity) or RAID 6 (double parity)

Second: Hardware RAID is dead and is a bad idea:

You want a /proper/ software managed RAID setup.

I don't know anything about SOFTRAID, so I can't speak to it. You could use Windows Storage Spaces to RAID those drives.

Internal or External won't make too much difference.

Demon Lord Bezos · April 12

You should only be able to see one drive, with the capacity of all your disks in that array, if you set up your raid correctly (you can partition later if you want) and you will lose 1/5 of your storage capacity because 1/5 of each disk is being used for parity. I think it's important to note that RAID really isn't for backups, it's for parity, meaning if a disk fails or breaks you'll still be able to access all your data.

I have no experience with software RAID but if you have the space in your computer I'd go with a RAID controller. You might not even need a controller if you have enough SATA ports on your motherboard. From there you can simply set it up from your bios. There are plenty of tutorials out there of going through that process.