RAID config

[Metapod14]

What does RAID do? Is it desperately needed for gaming/high end streaming PC?

[manikyath]

if you're asking that, no, it is not necessary for you at all.

 

EDIT: oh, and if you care for a bit of education, the wikipedia article on RAID is actually pretty well written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[heimdali]

Amongst other things, it provides redundancy, and it is a requirement because disks fail.  The hassle to recover from a disk failure alone is enough to use raid, not to mention the potential loss of data.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[SquintyG33Rs]

you don't need it. an SSD is all you NEED. if you are looking for redundancy backup raid is pretty good (raid 1 or 5). if you're looking for speed with raid 0 you won't be getting it with SSD because you probably didn't buy a dedicated raid card and the latency from the bios on top of a bunch of other factors mean your SSD won't be significantly faster in raid 0 then they would on their own. If you're doing it on hard drives though then it can be useful because they're so much slower to start with. but then you're still better off buying an ssd to boot.... so it's not worth your time

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, heimdali said:

The hassle to recover from a disk failure alone is enough to use raid, not to mention the potential loss of data.

but for a gaming rig the small chance of your disk dying (and relatively low importance of lost data) is neglible compared to needing more disks, not to mention that raid doesnt protect against failure of the device that was running the raid. did you update your bios? well.. how about tonight you start with recovering your raid.

 

if your gaming rig contains any data you REALLY dont wanna lose.. get one of those network NAS boxes, and do nightly backups.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drive, the basics are RAID 1 and 0

if you wanna go fast but risking the reliability go for RAID 0 because if one drive fails you will lose them data

i would go RAID 1 because your data is safe tho you are not improving data speed

but for streaming pc, i guess the need of a RAID seup is not too important

[Vandorlot]

Raid 0 increase performance to double and storage to double. If one drive fails lose everythng.

Raid 1 performance of 1 drive storage of 1, if 1 drive fails system will still work.

Raid 10 4 drives performance of 2, storage of 2, and also a backup of both of those drives.

[heimdali]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

but for a gaming rig the small chance of your disk dying (and relatively low importance of lost data) is neglible compared to needing more disks, not to mention that raid doesnt protect against failure of the device that was running the raid. did you update your bios? well.. how about tonight you start with recovering your raid.

 

if your gaming rig contains any data you REALLY dont wanna lose.. get one of those network NAS boxes, and do nightly backups.

Time is also a consideration, and it takes time to bring things back to where they were.  And yes, I updated the BIOS, and the BIOSs of the raid controllers, too.

 

Backups are also required, but they are usually outdated when a disk fails.

 

[heimdali]

11 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

you don't need it. an SSD is all you NEED. if you are looking for redundancy backup raid is pretty good (raid 1 or 5). if you're looking for speed with raid 0 you won't be getting it with SSD because you probably didn't buy a dedicated raid card and the latency from the bios on top of a bunch of other factors mean your SSD won't be significantly faster in raid 0 then they would on their own. If you're doing it on hard drives though then it can be useful because they're so much slower to start with. but then you're still better off buying an ssd to boot.... so it's not worth your time

I´ve been reading that SSDs are particularly troublesome because when they fail, the failure is usually sudden and total, leaving you unable to rescue anything at all.

 

What´s your backup good for when you spent 10 hours programming and bang, all your work is gone because it isn´t in the backups yet.

 

It´s like saying you don´t need an UPS.  Just wait until a power surge ruins your $3000 hardware or sends your hour of work into nirvana because you forgot to save it.

 

Besides, you don´t need SSDs.  They are a rather expensive convenience.

 

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, heimdali said:

Time is also a consideration, and it takes time to bring things back to where they were.  And yes, I updated the BIOS, and the BIOSs of the raid controllers, too.

 

Backups are also required, but they are usually outdated when a disk fails.

nightly backups, will your world end when you lose a maximum of 24 hours of gamesaves?

 

and seriously.. i've had one of my laptops in pretty much any environment they say kills hard drives.. and 6 years later its still going strong. its simply that the chance of disks dying is so low that its not worth it anyways.

 

in a pool of 3 laptops, 7 desktops and a server i've had a total of 1 drive die. among the survivors are a 20 year old bucket of rust, several tortured laptop drives (i'm NOT careful with these things), and a few that were transported floating around a backpack several times.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, heimdali said:

What´s your backup good for when you spent 10 hours programming and bang, all your work is gone because it isn´t in the backups yet.

which is why at work all our "10 hours programming" stuff is stored straight onto a redundant storage array on the network, also saving us the trouble of having 4 disks in every employee's laptop

 

since you mention SSDs.. here's my take on which storage solution to use in which case:

- SSD for your windows install and *ONLY* your windows install, only store stuff you dont care about on SSDs, they go very fast, but they also like to die very fast and unanounced

- single hard drive for stuff like games and game saves. spinning rust tends to "announce death" giving you time to at least recover your savegames before turning into a very heavy coaster for your energy drink.

- redundant storage array on the network for any stuff that essentially has direct monetary value attached to the files. thinking the stuff you work on for pay, the stuff you need to hold on to to keep the buisiness rolling, and so on.

 

the reason why i prefer keeping the redundant storage on the network is to keep it out the devices i'm working on, so their noise is not next to me, and they are removed from other potential component failures (would be a shame if your GPU clonking out would zap your hard drives as well, in an extreme case)

 

that as well as the reduced chance of it getting "hijacked" trough cryptolockers or other forms of ransomware. there's a certain added level of safety if the device holding the things you care about cannot directly access the internet.

[heimdali]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

nightly backups, will your world end when you lose a maximum of 24 hours of gamesaves?

 

and seriously.. i've had one of my laptops in pretty much any environment they say kills hard drives.. and 6 years later its still going strong. its simply that the chance of disks dying is so low that its not worth it anyways.

 

in a pool of 3 laptops, 7 desktops and a server i've had a total of 1 drive die. among the survivors are a 20 year old bucket of rust, several tortured laptop drives (i'm NOT careful with these things), and a few that were transported floating around a backpack several times.

Who knows, I might loose all my data when the world ends.  I do know that my time, the increased reliability and not having the hassle involved with disk failures is worth far more than, for example, the EUR 60 I spent on the 2nd SSD that went into my server.  Same goes for the 100 I spent on the 2nd 5TB disk that holds my data, plus the fact that some of that data is irreplacable.

 

Disks fail pretty randomly.  The usual behaviour is that a disk fails either within about the first 3 months, after about 3 years or virtually never because they are being replaced before they fail.  There are exceptions to this as well.

 

Disks in laptops usually have a very high failure rate; SSDs probably hold up much better in laptops.  Of course, you can always get lucky.

 

[heimdali]

6 minutes ago, manikyath said:

which is why at work all our "10 hours programming" stuff is stored straight onto a redundant storage array on the network, also saving us the trouble of having 4 disks in every employee's laptop

 

since you mention SSDs.. here's my take on which storage solution to use in which case:

- SSD for your windows install and *ONLY* your windows install, only store stuff you dont care about on SSDs, they go very fast, but they also like to die very fast and unanounced

- single hard drive for stuff like games and game saves. spinning rust tends to "announce death" giving you time to at least recover your savegames before turning into a very heavy coaster for your energy drink.

- redundant storage array on the network for any stuff that essentially has direct monetary value attached to the files. thinking the stuff you work on for pay, the stuff you need to hold on to to keep the buisiness rolling, and so on.

 

the reason why i prefer keeping the redundant storage on the network is to keep it out the devices i'm working on, so their noise is not next to me, and they are removed from other potential component failures (would be a shame if your GPU clonking out would zap your hard drives as well, in an extreme case)

 

that as well as the reduced chance of it getting "hijacked" trough cryptolockers or other forms of ransomware. there's a certain added level of safety if the device holding the things you care about cannot directly access the internet.

I don´t only program at work.  And why would you need 4 disks in your laptops?

 

If you never install or configure anything beyond your windoze installations, you can easily replace it, still that takes time.  And even though you can usually rescue things from HDs, that also takes time, and it means downtime that can be avoided.

 

Having storage on the network doesn´t automagically make it save, and it doesn´t have to be loud.

 

[manikyath]

7 hours ago, heimdali said:

the increased reliability and not having the hassle involved with disk failures is worth far more than, for example, the EUR 60 I spent on the 2nd SSD that went into my server.

two things:

- 1: OP is talking about a gaming rig, not a server

- 2: RAID actually increases chance of failure, in trade for being able to swap a failed drive.

[KuJoe]

RAID is good for mission critical stuff where you can't afford downtime. RAID is not a backup solution. RAID is not needed for most home users.

[heimdali]

9 hours ago, manikyath said:

two things:

- 1: OP is talking about a gaming rig, not a server

- 2: RAID actually increases chance of failure, in trade for being able to swap a failed drive.

It doesn´t increase the chance that a disk fails, only the chance that you might experience a disk failing because you have more of them.  If you don´t use redundancy, the chance that a disk fails is the same, and the difference is that when it fails, it costs you time, nerves, downtime and maybe even data loss.  That goes for gaming computers as well as for servers.

[heimdali]

9 hours ago, KuJoe said:

RAID is good for mission critical stuff where you can't afford downtime. RAID is not a backup solution. RAID is not needed for most home users.

A backup is usually outdated when a disk fails.  You must be assuming that people are finding it irrelevant whether they can keep their data or not, or why would you advise people to use a setup in which data loss is imminent.

 

[manikyath]

3 hours ago, heimdali said:

It doesn´t increase the chance that a disk fails, only the chance that you might experience a disk failing because you have more of them. 

exactly, more disks => more chance of *a* failure happening.

also, depending on the type of raid chosen, it can put more load on the disks.

 

please tell me how many disks you have fail? because as i've pointed at before, in your average desktop the chance of a failure happening is so small that its not worth the extra effort, cost, and space.

 

besides, i've still yet to hear a reason to put raid in a gaming/streaming desktop (as OP asked about) as opposed to nightly backups.

[KuJoe]

3 hours ago, heimdali said:

A backup is usually outdated when a disk fails.  You must be assuming that people are finding it irrelevant whether they can keep their data or not, or why would you advise people to use a setup in which data loss is imminent.

 

My post didn't mention backups at all. I'm a huge proponent of backups and sync all of my important data in realtime so no power loss or hardware failure would ever impact me. This thread is about RAID, not backups.

[heimdali]

On 10/30/2017 at 9:12 PM, KuJoe said:

My post didn't mention backups at all. I'm a huge proponent of backups and sync all of my important data in realtime so no power loss or hardware failure would ever impact me. This thread is about RAID, not backups.

You said "RAID is not a backup solution.", so you did mention backups.

 

BTW, syncing the data without timely delays is not a substitute for backups; and how would a failure not affect you when the source disk you´re syncing from fails?

 

[KuJoe]

51 minutes ago, heimdali said:

You said "RAID is not a backup solution.", so you did mention backups.

 

BTW, syncing the data without timely delays is not a substitute for backups; and how would a failure not affect you when the source disk you´re syncing from fails?

 

I didn't actually mention anything about backups, I just said that RAID is not a form of backup. That being said, if a handful disk drives failed right now I wouldn't lose any data because I go crazy with my backup scheme to a point where it would take a lot of drive failures around the world for it to make any significant impact on me.

 

I feel like we're getting off topic since the topic is RAID and not backups (if you want to open a new thread though I can talk about backups until my fingers hurt, I love talking about backups).

[heimdali]

On 10/30/2017 at 9:01 PM, manikyath said:

exactly, more disks => more chance of *a* failure happening.

also, depending on the type of raid chosen, it can put more load on the disks.

 

please tell me how many disks you have fail? because as i've pointed at before, in your average desktop the chance of a failure happening is so small that its not worth the extra effort, cost, and space.

 

besides, i've still yet to hear a reason to put raid in a gaming/streaming desktop (as OP asked about) as opposed to nightly backups.

If you´re asking about how many disks I´ve seen failing over the years:  I don´t remember exactly; counting the ones I do remember, it was at least 11, plus a few in laptops, plus four that had a nasty habit of dropping out of a raid (they weren´t made for that, but it´s also a disk failure).  I´ve also had one that failed many times over and over again because of bad firmware (from which the raid saved me big time) and a computer with a disk controller that had gone bad (in which case raid with that controller wouldn´t have helped).

 

That you may not have seen many disk failures doesn´t mean that they don´t fail quite a lot.  They fail more like all the time.  I´m not sure if you have a perspective on downtime:  It currently takes about 8 hours to copy my data from one machine to another, and that alone means 8 hours downtime if I´d have to restore it from the backup.  I don´t even have much data, and even if you assume only $10 per hour, the second disk needed for a raid1 has already payed for itself when a disk fails because it saves me these 8 hours, besides saving me from any data loss and the hassle.

 

I´ve given reasons to use raid.  It doesn´t make a difference if a disk fails in a server or in a computer used for playing games.  Either you don´t use redundancy and have to spend time to recover, experience all the hassle that´s involved, have prolonged downtime and perhaps suffer data loss, or you do use raid and when a disk fails, you simply pull the failed one out, plug a replacement in and are done with it.

 

Let me also add another thought:  It´s outright ridiculous seeing people like squeezing the last buck out of their wallets to get or to build the fastest machine they can get, or having set a budget and weighing options back and forth big time to get the fastest thing within their budget without giving any consideration to the amount of time and hassle they will have to deal with when a disk fails.  Time spent with such failures defeats the fastness they are trying to achieve, and using raid, they could not only save themselves such problems, but also have a faster storage system and thus a faster machine.

 

There´s no excuse for not using redundancy other than "I don´t care if I loose my data and my time" or "I really can´t affort it (now), so I´ll take the risk because it´s better than not having a computer at all (and do something about it later)".  Of course, it´s your choice, your time, your data and your money.  Yet saying "you don´t need redundancy (raid)" is like saying "you don´t need fire fighters".  I say raid (redundancy) is a requirement, as are fire fighters.

 

[heimdali]

5 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

I didn't actually mention anything about backups, I just said that RAID is not a form of backup. That being said, if a handful disk drives failed right now I wouldn't lose any data because I go crazy with my backup scheme to a point where it would take a lot of drive failures around the world for it to make any significant impact on me.

 

I feel like we're getting off topic since the topic is RAID and not backups (if you want to open a new thread though I can talk about backups until my fingers hurt, I love talking about backups).

Saying that raid is not a form of backup is already something said about backup, i. e. that raid is not a form of it (which technically isn´t true, but I know what you mean)

 

We might just disagree, or we could argue for the rest of our lives ...

 

[KuJoe]

16 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Saying that raid is not a form of backup is already something said about backup, i. e. that raid is not a form of it (which technically isn´t true, but I know what you mean)

 

We might just disagree, or we could argue for the rest of our lives ...

 

I'm pretty sure we're on the same page about backups and how important they are though.

[heimdali]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

I'm pretty sure we're on the same page about backups and how important they are though.

I´m not sure, I wouldn´t give my data out of hands just to make backups --- though off-site backups are, of course, an important consideration.

 

In practise, I´ve been years without backups.  Raid works really well.