RAID for gaming pc build?

[WoofyDaTechHound]

So im in for my first build and was not too hearsed with raid other than it is a bit more reliable than just have a few drives in your rig. I'd be doing this after id almost put everything but the kitchen sink into this build before trying this. Could anyone tell me if this is something that would really make a difference for high amounts of storage that id like to make more reliable and redundant to failures. 

Any knowledge or advice is accepted. I literally have only really heard from linus and wiki about what raid is

[JakeNTech]

2 minutes ago, Sgt. ShadoWolf said:

So im in for my first build and was not too hearsed with raid other than it is a bit more reliable than just have a few drives in your rig. I'd be doing this after id almost put everything but the kitchen sink into this build before trying this. Could anyone tell me if this is something that would really make a difference for high amounts of storage that id like to make more reliable and redundant to failures. 

Any knowledge or advice is accepted. I literally have only really heard from linus and wiki about what raid is

After having RAID on a home server I can tell you that I don't think its not worth it unless you want to run them in RAID 0 or 1, which give you speed as opposed to redundancy. A little story here, my ex home server had a RAID card in that had RAM for cache and a battery back up, I think I had it in raid 5 but it was a while ago now, the power went out and the battery kept what was in the ram, as ram is volatile so it looses data on it when power off, but as the power came back on it power surged and corrupted the ram and all the drives connected to the RAID card, I had a UPS and power sure extensions, but it didn't help. I wouldn't touch RAID unless I had drives that could be used to backup the RAID array. But if you want to make those drives faster and don't care about backups then I would run RAID 1 or 0. I am sure there are things I could have done to prevent that from happening, like using the SATA on the mobo as opposed to a card. 

I don't recommend RAID, there is a video on LTT when there servers raid card died. 

[WoofyDaTechHound]

3 hours ago, fixitnow said:

After having RAID on a home server I can tell you that I don't think its not worth it unless you want to run them in RAID 0 or 1, which give you speed as opposed to redundancy. A little story here, my ex home server had a RAID card in that had RAM for cache and a battery back up, I think I had it in raid 5 but it was a while ago now, the power went out and the battery kept what was in the ram, as ram is volatile so it looses data on it when power off, but as the power came back on it power surged and corrupted the ram and all the drives connected to the RAID card, I had a UPS and power sure extensions, but it didn't help. I wouldn't touch RAID unless I had drives that could be used to backup the RAID array. But if you want to make those drives faster and don't care about backups then I would run RAID 1 or 0. I am sure there are things I could have done to prevent that from happening, like using the SATA on the mobo as opposed to a card. 

I don't recommend RAID, there is a video on LTT when there servers raid card died. 

I watched the vids when the server died

 

[JakeNTech]

Just now, Sgt. ShadoWolf said:

I watched the vids when the server died

 

Ace, that was my fear with my home server, the card still works in my home server though, but I don't use it anymore, I was only me in our house that was benefiting from it , I went back to USB HDD's, 

[Dargenfire]

RAID 1 Is the way to go If you want reliability. RAID 1 stripes two drives, meaning that they are a mirror copy of each other.

The disadvantage to RAID 1 is that you get half the storage you paid for, since the same information is being stored on both drives.

 

RAID 1 will give you higher read speeds (because there's two drives with the same information to pull from, therefore double the theoretical bandwidth)

but it will maintain normal write speeds, because new data has to be written to both drives.

 

If one drive in a RAID 1 array fails, the array will continue to operate normally (even if it happens while your computer is running), allowing you to keep your data intact, and even put in a new drive to set up a RAID array again.

I have friends who do freelance video and film production, and most of their mass storage systems use RAID 1 because they cannot afford to lose any bit of footage.

 

1 minute ago, Sgt. ShadoWolf said:

I watched the vids when the server died

That was using hardware RAID cards though.

If you're not going to be doing stuff like 24/7 drive operation, then software RAID (through Windows) will be much more reliable.