HD and RAID Recommendations/Help Please

[Rachner]

Building a new system that will be used some for gaming, a little more for video editing and mostly mundane stuff. Current system uses a 80GB drive with external back-up and haven't used 50% of the drive yet (though not much video stuff yet).

Drive speed is nice but not willing to pay tons for it. Have seen a lot of people use RAID 0 for OS but RAID 0 makes me nervous given a recent HD failure with no warning on my wife's computer. I like RAID 1 for its back-up and little faster read speed (though longer write speed), though have seen threads warning about viruses wiping that security away and still needing routine back-ups.

So my questions are:
1. Any RAID set-up recommendations, and what do you recommend putting on each drive.
2. HD recommendations...I know Raptors are fast but are a little noisier and more $ per GB. Saw a recent review that SATA 2 drives are not horribly behind Raptors and have been eyeing the Seagate 160GB or 300GB SATA 2 drive (about same price as Raptor 74)....but open to any ideas. HD decision is my last one before building my system. Thanks in advance to all that respond.

 

[Zepper]

Welcome to the AT Forums by the way...

To get a performance benefit you have to use RAID 0 or RAID 5. If you read the papers on RAID over on the Anandtech side and at StorageReview.com, they agree that the performance benefit of software RAID 0 doesn't outweigh the added risk (for a single user) and RAID-5 is quite pricey. RAID-1 IS NOT a secure backup solution (it is good to remember that all the drives attached to one controller could be damaged at the same time and in the same way - how good is that for backup? - the external backup you are using is a proper backup), it should be thought of as a way to minimize downtime only. And you will take a slight performance hit from RAID-1 via most integrated ATA RAID and inexpensive add-on cards.

Some integrated and inexpensive add-on cards offer a mode called JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or 'spanning' which can combine several small drives into one large volume. This is done without striping (RAID-0 is spanning with striping) so the risk is less than when using RAID 0. That might be useful for video editing as generally more space is needed rather than raw disk performance.

Food for thought, eh...

.bh.

 

[Gillbot]

Raid 5 is a nice balance of performance and data integrity. It's fairly cheap to setup in SCSI but you usually don't get as much storage volume per $. PATA IDE costs a bit more due to the lack of controller options but larger volume drives are fairly cheap. SATA might be better but I have zero SATA experience.

EDIT> I just dismantled my Raid 5 SCSI setup, it was pretty darn quick!

 

[Yeormom]

I'd recommend a SATA2 RAID system. The performance is extremely close to Ultra320, the price is considerably lower, and even some motherboards offer the option built in with decent controllers. A site of high speed drives and your good to go and not broke either.

 

[Madwand1]

It seems to me that you might not have a good idea of your storage and performance needs. Most of the recommendatations against RAID here and on Storage Review are usage-based. I.e. they advise that for most uses, gaming and typical, high-performance single or RAID drives do not make a large difference. One of the exceptions to this, however, is non-linear video editing. If/when you are doing a lot of that, you might have a better sense of your needs, for speed, capacity, and redundancy.

Suggestion 1.

According to this, I'd advise you to consider building a system with minimal initial HD commitment, and flexibility for subseqent addition.

This means, wait for it...

PATA! (Bah, you looked ahead..)

Why:

1. You can move this drive to the greatest number of potential systems down the road.
2. You leave the greatest number of SATA slots free for future RAID / etc.
3. You do not get a significant overall performance degradation with PATA vs. SATA at this time.

Why not:

1. The market is going SATA; it may be harder to find some newer drives in PATA version.
2. There is some potential cooling impact from wide IDE cables. (Mitigatable.)
3. SATA 3.0 Gb/s can give improved buffer-to-host performance (YMMV per application / luck.)

Suggestion 2.

IMO, HD life can potentially be increased with a little bit of air flow over the drives. This makes a significant difference to the temperature; I don't have any hard data, but believe that this could affect life / reliability. (Additionally, HDDlife is some software that is supposed to monitor your drives' health and give you some advance warning about failure, and what they report on the task bar is temperature.)

Esp. if you're looking forward to potentially going with a sizeable RAID array, I'd add to the HD cooling as a consideration for the case. Even something as simple as an Antec SLK3000 includes some decent drive cooling in the design.

Suggestion 3.

Look at the temperature of your wife's HD. If it's high, consider getting an add-on cooler such as Antec's one.

Suggestion 4.

Don't worry so much about RAID 0's increased data risk. The data risk is there, and is increased, but IMO it's there to a significant degree in any single HD-based storage system. Put some external DVD writing / file copies / etc., into the plans for really important stuff; be prepared to lose everything else, as you can at any time.

I've written a little more about RAID 0 reliability here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1806276&enterthread=y

RAID 5 is definitely better in this regard, but at a significant cost -- min of 3 drives, lose 1 drive to parity, lose some write performance, need to find special hardware / OS to get RAID 5 capability.

(Personally, I run RAID 5.)

Suggestion 5.

Maxline III HD's. These seem to perform well, aren't much more expensive than main-line versions (if you shop well), and come with a longer guarantee and probably more reliability. Where other manufacturers have affordable "enterprise" ATA, then the same suggestion might apply for them.

(Personally, I haven't bought any Maxline III's because they were harder to find; I've bought Diamondmax 10's and not really worried about them.)