Need more storage, considering Raid option

[Code-E]

Gonna be honest, I know extremely little about anything Raid. I only know I'm wanting raid 0 because I looked it up, beyond that I know next to nothing. 

 

My goal is simply to have more storage. I make youtube videos and find myself struggling for storage with 1tb drive for both general storage and recorded videos.

I'm essentially wondering if it's worth the effort (or possible with the drives I have) to clear everything from my computer and do a raid setup. 

 

I wonder about the drives because one is a 3.5" and the other is a 2.5", I have NO idea if that has any bearing on raid, they're both 1tb though.

I might also worry about reliability, does raid lower the lifespan of the drives? Because I have no way of backing up anything right now. 

 

Thanks for any help. I have no idea what I'm doing and, having never even really thought about raid, most of the stuff I'm reading about it is going over my head.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Any chance you could invest in an external HDD? That would probably work pretty well for your use case.

[tikker]

Why not just buy a bigger drive? That will save you a lot of hassle. Read up on it first before you start doing stuff you have no clue about, that goes for anything.

[Code-E]

2 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Any chance you could invest in an external HDD? That would probably work pretty well for your use case.

I do have an external drive (it's pretty full), but I was looking at active (for lack of a better term) storage. Extra space for games and recordings and such. Not really to back things up.

Just now, tikker said:

Why not just buy a bigger drive? That will save you a lot of hassle. Read up on it first before you start doing stuff you have no clue about, that goes for anything.

I'm considering raid first because I have the drives available, and I'm looking at spending money on other 'quality of life' upgrades. I really need more ram (currently rocking 8gb ddr3) and better cooling solutions.
If it really is too much of a hassle I'll likely end up grabbing a bigger drive.

But I figured if I have the hardware I should see if it's an option

[Cyracus]

raid doesn't give you more storage space, raid 0 can make your drives behave as if they're faster by striping the data across the disks, meaning half the data on each drive, if one drive fails or is removed you lose all the data so not the most reliable. raid 1 duplicates your data across drives so if one drive dies you still have all your data, halves your storage space. pretty sure Linus did a techquickie on raid, or you can read from wikipedia, they do a decent job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels  but basically if you want more storage, buy a bigger hard drive

[Code-E]

1 minute ago, Cyracus said:

raid doesn't give you more storage space, raid 0 can make your drives behave as if they're faster by striping the data across the disks, meaning half the data on each drive, if one drive fails or is removed you lose all the data so not the most reliable. raid 1 duplicates your data across drives so if one drive dies you still have all your data, halves your storage space. pretty sure Linus did a techquickie on raid, or you can read from wikipedia, they do a decent job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels  but basically if you want more storage, buy a bigger hard drive

I was seeing in wikipedia that the raid 0 array appears as a single large disk. I'll make sure to check out the techquickie tho.

[tikker]

1 minute ago, Code-E said:

I do have an external drive (it's pretty full), but I was looking at active (for lack of a better term) storage. Extra space for games and recordings and such. Not really to back things up.

I'm considering raid first because I have the drives available, and I'm looking at spending money on other 'quality of life' upgrades. I really need more ram (currently rocking 8gb ddr3) and better cooling solutions.
If it really is too much of a hassle I'll likely end up grabbing a bigger drive.

But I figured if I have the hardware I should see if it's an option

Ah, well as @Cyracus mentioned and as the name Redundant Array of Independent Disks implies, it is meant as redundancy to increase uptime and reliability and not increase storage. You could still try it just for fun, but I agree with the person above me, that you'll likely just want to buy a bigger drive if you just want more capacity 

[tikker]

Just now, Code-E said:

I was seeing in wikipedia that the raid 0 array appears as a single large disk. I'll make sure to check out the techquickie tho.

It will, but you will need both disks to operate. Lose one and the data on both is lost.

[Code-E]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Ah, well as @Cyracus mentioned and as the name Redundant Array of Independent Disks implies, it is meant as redundancy to increase uptime and reliability and not increase storage. You could still try it just for fun, but I agree with the person above me, that you'll likely just want to buy a bigger drive if you just want more capacity 

Well shoot, it could be a fun project, but I totally misunderstood the use of raid. I guess I'll be looking at bigger drives.

 

Thanks for the info

[Cyracus]

5 minutes ago, Code-E said:

I was seeing in wikipedia that the raid 0 array appears as a single large disk. I'll make sure to check out the techquickie tho.

it would help if you have really small drives, say 20gb and files larger than those drives, like 30gb, then you could use those two drives in raid to store the file, but you still have a max capacity of 40gb at best (some raids reduce total capacity to add redundancy so you can lose disks without data loss)

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Code-E said:

Well shoot, it could be a fun project, but I totally misunderstood the use of raid. I guess I'll be looking at bigger drives.

 

Thanks for the info

RAID 0 is probably the one you've heard most about, which "combines" drives. It's not actually RAID though, as it doesn't provide any redundancy. It's better grouped together with the likes of JBOD and BIG.

 

All of the actual RAID types will decrease your total drive capacity as some of it will be used for redundancy.

 

RAID 1, it's just the size of the smallest drive, so if you have two 1TB drives in RAID 1, you have 1TB of capacity. Add another drive to that RAID 1 array and you still have 1TB of capacity. Good for simple redundancy, doesn't scale at all. 

 

RAID 5, capacity of smallest drive x number of drives -1. So if you had 5x 1TB drives in RAID 5, you'd have 4TB of capacity. Each drive would have 200GB of recovery partations, providing the redundancy, allowing any one drive to fail with no data loss. 

 

RAID 6, same as RAID 5 but -2 drives capacity. So using the same situation as above, you'd have 3TB of capacity and any two drives can fail without data loss. 

 

RAID 10, combines RAID 1 and RAID 0. It halves the total capacity of the drives used. So 6x 1TB drives in RAID 10 would have 3TB of storage capacity. Personally, I dislike RAID 10 the most as it doesn't scale too well, is very wasteful and has a bad worst case scenario for the number of drives needed.