Raid Noob questions.

RikuAzhurlar · January 7, 2018

hello forums im new here and require a bit of help with raid. google has not been as good of an ally as it usually is and before i decide how i want to do this i want to ask a few questions,

so im remaking my gaming pc here in a couple weeks with some money i've been saving for a long time. and im debating if its worth the money to get a raid setup for it. heres the new specs

i7-8700k

G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory

Corsair - H100i v2 70.7 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler

MOBO is still a deciscion based on what i get from here

so from what the internet has kind of taught me im going to go with a raid 10 because of stability and speed it brings. but heres where google hasnt helped

software v hardware?

if hardware can i install windows directly onto it?

i was planning to use 4 2TB HDD so would i want regular or hybrid drives/ does it make a difference?

if hardware a good brand or card that inst overkill as far as pricing goes?

would i be better off just buying a 4TB hybrid drive and be done with it?

Thanks in advanced!

Edelrat · January 7, 2018

1 hour ago, RikuAzhurlar said:

-snip-

Buying a single HDD will be easier, and potentially save you some headache, its up to you to decide whether its worth it or not.

Also, I don't think hybrid drives are really worth it, I usually stick to the normal SSD + HDD combo.

Anyway, back to your questions:

I would use hardware-raid myself, unless you are using ZFS (which won't be the case if you are installing windows).

You can install Windows directly onto it, you may need to load the driver during the install tho (again, I would recommend a SSD for OS and some games or other stuff + HDD for anything else).

I have never done RAID with hybrid drives, but I don't think it will make a huge difference (if any at all).

For your use case you won't need a extra RAID controller, the onboard/Intel controller on your MB will do just fine.

Also, if all you want is speed, just use RAID0, it will save you two drives. If you also want redundancy, use RAID5. For "normal" home use it should be good enough in terms of speed.

leadeater · January 7, 2018

10 minutes ago, MEOOOOOOOOOOOOW said:

I usually stick to the normal SSD + HDD combo.

This, much easier.

1 hour ago, RikuAzhurlar said:

so from what the internet has kind of taught me im going to go with a raid 10 because of stability and speed it brings.

Hardware RAID 5 & 6 is faster and safer than 10. RAID 10 is only good in low disk numbers or in very write heavy continuous usages with major downs sides being 50% usable capacity and you cannot expand the array with more disks. RAID 5 & 6 can be online expanded with more disks and almost always performs better than RAID 10.

RAID 10 was faster back in the 90's and early 2000's but modern RAID cards have gotten much faster processors to do the parity calculations and a lot more cache to accelerate write performance.

1 hour ago, RikuAzhurlar said:

software v hardware?

If Windows then Storage Spaces unless you must have the boot volume as part of a RAID array then hardware is your only choice. In a lot of ways hardware RAID is nicer, it's what I'm more used to, but I also use Storage Spaces but on a simple desktop hardware RAID will be faster.

MWaldhauer · January 7, 2018

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Hardware RAID 5 & 6 is faster and safer than 10.

It most definitely is not! RAID 5 and 6 are smarter because they don't use up so much disk space and nowadays controllers are OK at handling it, writing to the array is still cumbersome.

13 hours ago, RikuAzhurlar said:

software v hardware?

if hardware can i install windows directly onto it?

Software raid is horrible and pose a lot of problems unless we are talking specifik storage solutions like FreeNAS or Unraid

Most raid controllers have drivers so you can install windows.

leadeater · January 7, 2018

7 hours ago, MWaldhauer said:

It most definitely is not! RAID 5 and 6 are smarter because they don't use up so much disk space and nowadays controllers are OK at handling it, writing to the array is still cumbersome.

No RAID 5 & 6 is actually faster, if you have an LSI hardware RAID card this has been true for a long time. RAID 10 also has bad scaling with number of disks, if you have a 24 HDD server it'll be a lot slower for anything other than very heavy random write. Also in a 24 HDD server RAID 10 is getting on the bounds of long term reliability concern, you only need 1 mirror set to fail and the array is lost.

It's simply an active usable spindle count issue, RAID 10 gets worse as the number of disks increase and it tips over fairly quickly in favor of parity RAID.

RAID 6 has faster seq read and write, very similar read IOPs and a bit less write IOPs while also being able to add more disks to an existing array, RAID 10 cannot be expanded and is only better at write IOPs but not always so it shouldn't be the default choice and only used if you need it.

If you see really bad parity performance you either don't have the BBU installed or it's failed, without that parity performance is bad.

Hardware based storage arrays from Dell, IBM/Lenovo, Netapp etc moved to pure double parity disk pooling many years ago which all incidentally use LSI hardware internally and are just re-badges.

Software RAID is a completely different story.