Help With RAID

[chrisprice12]

Hey,

 

I'm looking at creating a RAID array however I've never had any experience with this before. I'm looking at creating a RAID 10 as I will primarily be video editing -- don't worry, I have an SSD for a scratch disk, I would just like a RAID array so if I ever have to pull footage in the future and work with it, I'm not copying it back to my SSD then deleting it when I'm done.

 

What's your advice?

 

What's the point of a RAID controller - is it worth getting a RAID controller even if my mobo supports the RAID type I want to build?

 

How do you do it, and what are some things to look out for?

 

Thanks for everyone's help, I'd rather not lose any data haha.

 

Chris

[Josephdalepi]

Hey,

 

I'm looking at creating a RAID array however I've never had any experience with this before. I'm looking at creating a RAID 10 as I will primarily be video editing -- don't worry, I have an SSD for a scratch disk, I would just like a RAID array so if I ever have to pull footage in the future and work with it, I'm not copying it back to my SSD then deleting it when I'm done.

 

What's your advice?

 

What's the point of a RAID controller - is it worth getting a RAID controller even if my mobo supports the RAID type I want to build?

 

How do you do it, and what are some things to look out for?

 

Thanks for everyone's help, I'd rather not lose any data haha.

 

Chris

if you have a boot ssd and are planning to just raid the other drives, use your os disk manager

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

How many drives will be in the array?

 

I think you'll be fine with the motherboard array. Hardware RAID is meant for larger scale RAID arrays, and they cost a lot to match. Do expect to spend roughly $300-600 on a RAID card with a onboard battery backup.

 

You have to set the hard drive you want to RAID as RAID inside of BIOS (Usually they're set to ACHI). Then the Intel RAID controller menu will pop up (You usually have to press a key or key combination to get to the RAID manager) using BIOS startup. From there, you can set up the RAID to what you want.

 

As always, be aware that RAID is not a backup. It'll help keep your stuff online, but you should always have a external hard drive as a backup in case of hardware failure.

[chrisprice12]

if you have a boot ssd and are planning to just raid the other drives, use your os disk manager

 

Thanks. Yeah I have a boot SSD.

[chrisprice12]

How many drives will be in the array?

 

I think you'll be fine with the motherboard array. Hardware RAID is meant for larger scale RAID arrays, and they cost a lot to match. Do expect to spend roughly $300-600 on a RAID card with a onboard battery backup.

 

You have to set the hard drive you want to RAID as RAID inside of BIOS (Usually they're set to ACHI). Then the Intel RAID controller menu will pop up (You usually have to press a key or key combination to get to the RAID manager) using BIOS startup. From there, you can set up the RAID to what you want.

 

As always, be aware that RAID is not a backup. It'll help keep your stuff online, but you should always have a external hard drive as a backup in case of hardware failure.

I'm not sure as of yet. I plan to add them as I go, I'll start with 2 (obviously).

 

So you don't get more reliability or anything then using a card over the motherboard?

 

Okay, so I change a drive from AHCI to RAID? Then when in the Intel RAID controller, it asks me which drives and which RAID array I want? Is that right?

 

Yeah, I plan to do regular backups as well.

 

Thanks for the advice.

 

Chris

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

The cards are more stable / enterprise ready (Can run 24/7 under full workload until the card dies). That being said, they cost to match. A motherboard RAID is not a bad solution if you have enough available ports to use.

 

Yep, just make sure you do not accidently change your boot drive to RAID, then things go bad. But yeah, as long as you get into Intel RAID manager.

 

Also, be aware to create RAID10, you need a minimum of four drives. The other thing to be aware of is that you cannot expand a RAID10 array down the road. You have to destroy and build a whole new one (This involves you buying drives to temporarily hold your data as you build the new array).

 

The RAID card is better, but you have to know a bit of SAS (All RAID cards worth their value use SAS2 (6Gb/s) or SAS3 (12Gb/s). One SAS port can breakout to 4 drives. You can even add expanders to the mix and get even more SAS ports.

 

I would say stick to the onboard RAID until your data needs require it.

 

Also, I would buy a battery backup for the system with the RAID array in case of power outages.

[chrisprice12]

The cards are more stable / enterprise ready (Can run 24/7 under full workload until the card dies). That being said, they cost to match. A motherboard RAID is not a bad solution if you have enough available ports to use.

 

Yep, just make sure you do not accidently change your boot drive to RAID, then things go bad. But yeah, as long as you get into Intel RAID manager.

 

Also, be aware to create RAID10, you need a minimum of four drives. The other thing to be aware of is that you cannot expand a RAID10 array down the road. You have to destroy and build a whole new one (This involves you buying drives to temporarily hold your data as you build the new array).

 

The RAID card is better, but you have to know a bit of SAS (All RAID cards worth their value use SAS2 (6Gb/s) or SAS3 (12Gb/s). One SAS port can breakout to 4 drives. You can even add expanders to the mix and get even more SAS ports.

 

I would say stick to the onboard RAID until your data needs require it.

 

Also, I would buy a battery backup for the system with the RAID array in case of power outages.

 

That sounds good, decent haha. Always see Linus using them so I thought it was a standard if you knew what you were doing. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Yeah haha I can imagine.

 

My apologies, got it mixed up. Yeah haha watched Linus' video on that a few weeks ago. I did not know you cant expand it down the road, thanks for telling me that, that's going to be a large deciding factor.

 

The battery backup system, are you implying you can get them for your motherboard? And what does that protect against? Does it realise that power has been lost and allows for the RAID to stop any tasks before it safely shuts down? How would I look for one?

 

Thanks, you've been a big help

 

Chris

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

Well, onboard RAID isn't bad, but hardware RAID is better. It's not so much knowing what you're doing, but setting something up that fits your needs / budget.

 

Yeah, RAID levels (Except a few RAID levels, 5 or 6 I think, the rest aren't expandable..but you have to look at the manual for your specific model to see what RAID levels are supported).

 

The battery back up is for the whole PC. You plug your PC into the battery back up. When the power goes out, it powers the PC (Until the battery gets close to running out). Then, it'll use a USB trigger to tell your PC to turn off safely. I recommend APC UPS units for this, though pick a decent mid range model and not the really cheap models (The idea of you get what you pay for applies).

 

Unless you were talking about the battery back up for a RAID card. This one protects just the RAID card from power loss within the PC, for example, PSU failure or your PC locking up, forcing you to do a force shutdown by holding down the power button. It just allows the RAID card to complete what operations it needs to / store what's on the RAID card's RAM while it waits for power to come back.

[chrisprice12]

Well, onboard RAID isn't bad, but hardware RAID is better. It's not so much knowing what you're doing, but setting something up that fits your needs / budget.

 

Yeah, RAID levels (Except a few RAID levels, 5 or 6 I think, the rest aren't expandable..but you have to look at the manual for your specific model to see what RAID levels are supported).

 

The battery back up is for the whole PC. You plug your PC into the battery back up. When the power goes out, it powers the PC (Until the battery gets close to running out). Then, it'll use a USB trigger to tell your PC to turn off safely. I recommend APC UPS units for this, though pick a decent mid range model and not the really cheap models (The idea of you get what you pay for applies).

 

Unless you were talking about the battery back up for a RAID card. This one protects just the RAID card from power loss within the PC, for example, PSU failure or your PC locking up, forcing you to do a force shutdown by holding down the power button. It just allows the RAID card to complete what operations it needs to / store what's on the RAID card's RAM while it waits for power to come back.

 

Ahh you're talking about a UPS? Yeah I'll look into one.

 

I thought all RAID's were expandable, I'm glad you told me different.

 

Thanks again.

 

Chris

 

[leadeater]

Ahh you're talking about a UPS? Yeah I'll look into one.

 

I thought all RAID's were expandable, I'm glad you told me different.

 

Thanks again.

 

Chris

 

 

The top tier expensive RAID cards from LSI and Adaptec should allow online disk expansion of RAID 10. The HP RAID cards that are actually these cards with custom firmware and re-branded can do it but require battery backed up write-back cache to allow it. The expansion process takes a very long time and if interrupted destroys the array hence the BBU write-back cache requirement.

 

For onboard RAID adding disks on anything other than parity RAID is typically impossible. Intel onboard RAID is actually rather good so unless you need more than 4 disks in a single array this is a perfectly good option. Also don't use standard consumer SSDs on hardware RAID cards leave them on onboard Intel, hardware RAID disables TRIM but Intel onboard RAID does not.

 

The last bit of advice I would give would be to not use RAID 5/6 on onboard RAID due to the performance decrease, it is very slow on writes. If you need RAID 5/6 use hardware RAID with BBU write-back cache as this massively improves write performance, the difference is something similar to 30-60 MB/s to 600 MB/s.

[scottyseng]

-snip-

 

 

Yep, a UPS.

 

@leadeater makes great points as well.

 

Do keep in mind that some systems (Like prebuilt NASes) use proprietary RAID that can expand. As always, look at the manual for whatever motherboard / RAID controller you are using to see which levels support online expansion or not.

 

I recommend WD Red drives since they work great for RAID (I have six of them myself).