Raid help

[skkler]

So am i putting together a build and was thinking to try my hand at raid, now i know a little about raid but not as much as i used. so just a quick question. raid 0 is the fastest and requires 2 drives, that much i know, BUT im want to make it where its still as fast as raid 0 but has redundancy, anyone able to hlep me out?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Your options for that are RAID 10, which requires a minimum of 4 drives and combines RAID 1 and RAID 0. RAID 5 and 6, which benefit from performance gains due to striping data. They require a minimum of 3 and 4 drives respectively, but it's generally advised to not go below 4 and 5 respectively. 

 

Do you have a backup in place? If not, spend money on a backup before you consider RAID. Having redundancy through RAID is good where down time isn't acceptable or you have a large amount of data that would take a long time to restore if lost, but it does not work as a way to prevent data loss. It's no replacement for a backup in that sense. 

 

Also, is this using HDDs or SSDs? If it's the latter, i wouldn't bother with RAID, the speed benefits from it are typically very small. 

[skkler]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Your options for that are RAID 10, which requires a minimum of 4 drives and combines RAID 1 and RAID 0. RAID 5 and 6, which benefit from performance gains due to striping data. They require a minimum of 3 and 4 drives respectively, but it's generally advised to not go below 4 and 5 respectively. 

 

Do you have a backup in place? If not, spend money on a backup before you consider RAID. Having redundancy through RAID is good where down time isn't acceptable or you have a large amount of data that would take a long time to restore if lost, but it does not work as a way to prevent data loss. It's no replacement for a backup in that sense. 

 

Also, is this using HDDs or SSDs? If it's the latter, i wouldn't bother with RAID, the speed benefits from it are typically very small. 

ahh well you just answered every question i was gonna have, i planned on using 4 ssds but since it wont matter ill just make a NAS for back ups thank you!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do you want this bootabe? What OS? What are you doing raid with? Hardware raid? software? MOBO?

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

19 minutes ago, skkler said:

ahh well you just answered every question i was gonna have, i planned on using 4 ssds but since it wont matter ill just make a NAS for back ups thank you!

is this for boot or non boot storage?

 

Id just get a single nvme drive instead, it will be much faster and reliable.

[skkler]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

is this for boot or non boot storage?

 

Id just get a single nvme drive instead, it will be much faster and reliable.

thats what i ending up going with

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, skkler said:

ahh well you just answered every question i was gonna have, i planned on using 4 ssds but since it wont matter ill just make a NAS for back ups thank you!

While having multiple copies of the data is good, if it's accessible directly from your PC I wouldn't really consider it an effective backup. The recent ransomware attacks have made that clear, as if your PC can access the data on the NAS, so can the ransomware and the "backup" will be encrypted too. 

 

If a lot of the data you have can be re-obtained fairly easy, just have multiple copies of that and backup the important data properly. Even with multiple copies of data on different devices, it doesn't protect from power surges, malware, fire, theft, water damage and so on. Having an offline periodical backup protects from power surges and malware, while having another backup located in a different physical location protects more against the rest. 

 

How far you want to go really depends on how important the data is and how much you're willing to spend. Personally, I have an offline backup for all the data that isn't easy to re-obtain and then a bunch of copies of important data in various locations, including inexpensive USB sticks. Most of my important data is small in terms of size (documents and such) so I don't need huge drives to keep them. I have a large media collection (about 8-9TB worth) which is not backed up due to cost restrictions right now but it would certainly be a massive pain to restore it if I lost it, so it will eventually be backed up when I have the money for another 12TB or so of hard drives. 

 

As a note from personal experience, I would say it's worth moving data to newer drives based on how important it is if you can't back it up. It was just after I had mostly finished moving my media collection across to a new NAS system that I had a 3-4 year old HDD fail on me (it was in RAID 0 with another 2TB drive that was pretty much full, so 4TB of lost data). I got lucky with timing, but I'll never use RAID 0 (I never recommended it, but do as I say not as I do kind of thing) again after a close call.