Need help chosing a new storage setup

[Stefken89]

Hello everyone,

 

For a while I've been thinking about expanding + redoing my storage setup, but I never got around to it.
Now my HDD with my mediafiles on it is failing, so I need to do something anyway, so now's probably the best time to rethinking my setup.

 

 

This is the current situation:

 

2 SSD's with OS'ses, programs and games, no important data

1 HDD with the rest of the programs and games, no important data

 

These will remain the same, since no important data anyway.

 

2 HDD's with important data, of which I make regular copies on an external HDD. (one of which is now failing)

 

 

 

I have an intel controller on my mobo on which I have 4 spots left when I'm changing up my setup.

Should I:

 

- Go for a new controller, or is onboard ok? Which ones are good? 4 drives should be enough.

- Go for a RAID 1 setup with 4 drives

- 2x RAID 1, one for the data, one for media

- RAID 5

- no RAID, just manual copies or daily copy setup

- I'd rather not go for a NAS since that's much more expensive

 

I will probably go with 4TB HDD's, since those seem to be money/storage at the best point where I'm shopping. (WD Red?)

 

I will still be doing regular backups on external disks to keep the data safe on unplugged drives.

 

Thank you for your input.

Greetings,

 

Stef

 

 

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

Onboard is okay for a small array / on a budget. A proper RAID card costs $500-700. My LSI MegaRAID 92608i-CV was $600 new when I bought it. The current gen LSI MegaRAID 9361-8i with Cache Vault is roughly the same cost. There's also the cost of SAS breakout cables as well. I'd stick with onboard.

 

If you have four drives, I'd personally do RAID 10. RAID6 if you want more space.

 

I would go for WD Reds. I have four 4TB Red Drives that 2 years old and they're working fine still. Make sure you use WD's Lifeguard tool and do a extended test on each drive you buy and let it idle for a few days before committing them to a RAID array just do you know they're not DOA (It's happened to me several times....UPS kills them poor drives).

[Stefken89]

Onboard is okay for a small array / on a budget. A proper RAID card costs $500-700. My LSI MegaRAID 92608i-CV was $600 new when I bought it. The current gen LSI MegaRAID 9361-8i with Cache Vault is roughly the same cost. There's also the cost of SAS breakout cables as well. I'd stick with onboard.

 

If you have four drives, I'd personally do RAID 10. RAID6 if you want more space.

 

I would go for WD Reds. I have four 4TB Red Drives that 2 years old and they're working fine still. Make sure you use WD's Lifeguard tool and do a extended test on each drive you buy and let it idle for a few days before committing them to a RAID array just do you know they're not DOA (It's happened to me several times....UPS kills them poor drives).

 

Thank you for that input. I will use the onboard controller.

But I'm still not sold on which raid to go with. I was thinking about doing 2x RAID 1. Isn't it more safe than RAID 10? Speed is not my concern since it'll be fast enough either way for the transfers I make anyway.

A question I have about RAID 1 though, is it basically the same as a straight copy? I mean, can I use the data on both disks or do they have to be both there to work? Like if I moved one of the disks to another system, would it work on its own without a RAID- setup?

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

RAID10 and 2xRAID1 are identical, except they you see one large volume instead of two separate RAID1 drives. In terms of safety, both would be identical (You can lose one drive in each mirrored pair without losing any data). In terms of performance though, the RAID10 would be faster.

 

RAID in general is just a sticker label for a system of organizing a bunch of disks in a certain manner. The RAID controller is what dictates what can read it's RAID system. For example, onboard Intel RAID cannot read my LSI MegaRAID array, and vice versa. You cannot switch between ACHI (Normal hard drive mode) and RAID at free will. For RAID1, I don't think it's possible (Or if it is, probably not recommended) to remove a drive from a RAID1 array and stick it in another PC with the same controller and hope it picks it up (If it does, the controller will complain it needs another drive to copy in order to fix the RAID1 array). In the end, you cannot open your RAID array without the same RAID controller (or a similar one).

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey Stefken89,

 

I'd support @scottyseng's suggestion of going with the onboard controller. How much space are you looking at having as usable? 

Since you are going with four drives, RAID10 and RAID6 will both take up two drives for the redundancy and you will end up with 8TB of usable space (if you go with 4TB HDDs). Same goes with the two separate RAID1 arrays but will give you only one drive failure tolerance whereas RAID6 and RAID10 can sustain 2 drives failing before putting your data in danger. RAID5 will give you one drive fail tolerance but should give you about 12TB of usable space as it uses only one drive for redundancy. It's really up to you to decide how much space you need and what level of redundancy you'd rather have.

WD Red are indeed good choice for such setup as they are NAS/RAID class drives and as such have the necessary features for a more secure and stable performance in NAS/RAID environments. Here's a bit more info on that: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Mrgh9U

 

Feel free to ask if you have questions

 

Captain_WD.

[Stefken89]

 

Hey Stefken89,

 

I'd support @scottyseng's suggestion of going with the onboard controller. How much space are you looking at having as usable? 

Since you are going with four drives, RAID10 and RAID6 will both take up two drives for the redundancy and you will end up with 8TB of usable space (if you go with 4TB HDDs). Same goes with the two separate RAID1 arrays but will give you only one drive failure tolerance whereas RAID6 and RAID10 can sustain 2 drives failing before putting your data in danger. RAID5 will give you one drive fail tolerance but should give you about 12TB of usable space as it uses only one drive for redundancy. It's really up to you to decide how much space you need and what level of redundancy you'd rather have.

WD Red are indeed good choice for such setup as they are NAS/RAID class drives and as such have the necessary features for a more secure and stable performance in NAS/RAID environments. Here's a bit more info on that: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Mrgh9U

 

Feel free to ask if you have questions

 

Captain_WD.

 

 

Thank you for the info, oh captian, my captain.