Raid setup questions

[Inception9269]

In the next month or so I plan on upgrading my current storage devices (currently i have a 128gb ssd and 1tb hdd) my hdd has barely 150gb left, so my plan for that was to get a 4tb hdd and move everything from my old hdd to the new one.

 

As for my ssd, I was planning on buying two 256gb ssds (A-Data has them for only $100, and a-data is the same brand as my current ssd so i trust them). I was wanting to run them in raid but wasn't sure which. I was thinking about raid 1 so they'd always be backed up, but I was now thinking about doing raid 0 with them for 512gb total space; however I would be doubling the risk of losing my data.

 

I want to ask about raid 10. I know linus showed it off using 4 drives, but is it possible to do with 3? have the first two ssds stripe, and have the third drive be something to save a copy to?

 

That probably sounds stupid, when I could just do regular backups using another hdd, but I don't really want to have to remember to do that all the time.

[GuruMeditationError]

As far as I know it has to be an even and equal number etc.. There might be solutions with expensive dedicated raid cards that let you create a virtual raid array on a single card or that might be configurable to recognise partitions as separate drives but basic raid is just that, pretty basic. I've been wrestling with it for a while and there's not really any way to be creative with it without lots of expensive hardware.

 

With raid I tend to try and exercise k.i.s. (keep it simple) and as simple as possible.

[Jaybird]

Most will advise against raid as it's volition and if you don't know what you are doing can loose data.

[Inception9269]

One thing ive seen all over the place is people who make it seem like hdds and ssds die all the time. Ive seen lots of youtube videos where people make it sound like they'll die from the slightest thing. Ive had an old hdd from over 4 years ago in an old laptop and later taken out to use as an external drive, that thing has been dropped many times while still spinning and still worked fine. So I dont believe people who make it seem like hdds and ssds just die all the time.

I guess I could use my 1tb hdd to back it up no and then, probably every two weeks?

[GuruMeditationError]

Striped raid is good for overall P.C. performance speed (more-so than RAM these days) but doesn't really affect gaming, apart from speeding up the load times.

 

Personally I'd like to use a mirrored stripe but I wouldn't expect to be able to re-build it if something went wrong (it just doesn't seem that robust a technology outside of dedicated hardware costing thousands). If a drive failed I'd just run on the remaining two and start thinking about a re-installation.

 

Also, I've bought a lot of drives for storage and have had a few failures. You might be lucky with the drive you have. Mechanical drives do fail and eventually they'll all fail if they're used heavily enough.

[handruin]

In the next month or so I plan on upgrading my current storage devices (currently i have a 128gb ssd and 1tb hdd) my hdd has barely 150gb left, so my plan for that was to get a 4tb hdd and move everything from my old hdd to the new one.

 

As for my ssd, I was planning on buying two 256gb ssds (A-Data has them for only $100, and a-data is the same brand as my current ssd so i trust them). I was wanting to run them in raid but wasn't sure which. I was thinking about raid 1 so they'd always be backed up, but I was now thinking about doing raid 0 with them for 512gb total space; however I would be doubling the risk of losing my data.

 

I want to ask about raid 10. I know linus showed it off using 4 drives, but is it possible to do with 3? have the first two ssds stripe, and have the third drive be something to save a copy to?

 

That probably sounds stupid, when I could just do regular backups using another hdd, but I don't really want to have to remember to do that all the time.

 

 

Just to put this in perspective.  RAID 1 or RAID 10 is never a backup.  RAID is for availability and sometimes performance (in cases of RAID 10, 50, and 60).  Do not mislead yourself into thinking mirroring a drive is for backups.  

[handruin]

One thing ive seen all over the place is people who make it seem like hdds and ssds die all the time. Ive seen lots of youtube videos where people make it sound like they'll die from the slightest thing. Ive had an old hdd from over 4 years ago in an old laptop and later taken out to use as an external drive, that thing has been dropped many times while still spinning and still worked fine. So I dont believe people who make it seem like hdds and ssds just die all the time.

I guess I could use my 1tb hdd to back it up no and then, probably every two weeks?

 

The death of a drive is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.  Your example is a single sample of a drive and not enough to make an arguable claim of drive reliability.  It’s a tough claim to make unless you’re exposed to large quantities of drives.  I’ve large managed arrays for many years and have seen lots of drive failures.  Of my personal collection of drives I’ve seen very few.

 

Your laptop drive example is typically designed to park the heads when acceleration and g-forces are detected to mitigate damage.  Drives do die all the time, you just have too low of a sampling to see it.

 

Regardless of claims for drives dying, one has to decide if they want to use raid for an arguable performance advantage (RAID 0) in comparison to the statistical odds of increasing your chances of failure.  The other aspect is availability.  Can you tolerate downtime if a drive fails?  If not, then protect it with a mirror or parity.  If your data is truly important, you have backups on another location which could be local and/or remote.  There are cheap ways to do this.  RAID won’t protect you from corruption, spyware, virus, bit rot, etc.  Sure, these things may not happen frequently but when it does, you’ll either be happy you prepared for it, or say goodbye to some or all your data.  It’s your call how important your data is.

[handruin]

Striped raid is good for overall P.C. performance speed (more-so than RAM these days) but doesn't really affect gaming, apart from speeding up the load times.

 

Personally I'd like to use a mirrored stripe but I wouldn't expect to be able to re-build it if something went wrong (it just doesn't seem that robust a technology outside of dedicated hardware costing thousands). If a drive failed I'd just run on the remaining two and start thinking about a re-installation.

 

Also, I've bought a lot of drives for storage and have had a few failures. You might be lucky with the drive you have. Mechanical drives do fail and eventually they'll all fail if they're used heavily enough.

 

Striped raid can be good for sequential data, but it has benefit sometimes with random data, more specifically when it comes to HDD.  There are hardware raid solutions (as well as software) that work fine with RAID 10 (mirrored stripe).  You don't have to spend thousands to get this benefit, you can spend $100-$200 and be sitting pretty.  LSI makes decent consumer and enterprise level RAID controllers if you want a dedicated controller for this.  You could instead offload it to the CPU using something like ZFS.

[Inception9269]

Striped raid can be good for sequential data, but it has benefit sometimes with random data, more specifically when it comes to HDD.  There are hardware raid solutions (as well as software) that work fine with RAID 10 (mirrored stripe).  You don't have to spend thousands to get this benefit, you can spend $100-$200 and be sitting pretty.  LSI makes decent consumer and enterprise level RAID controllers if you want a dedicated controller for this.  You could instead offload it to the CPU using something like ZFS.

 

Quick question, I've been looking around I heard somewhere before that with Samsung SSDs they warn you before it dies, and was wondering if this drive here would have that http://pcpartpicker.com/part/samsung-internal-hard-drive-mz75e250bam if so i'd get 2 of them and do raid 0. the reason why I want more than one ssd is for the speed increase, also I want to have a lot of space cause I want to use ssd space to make hdds go faster.