Is raid 5 with IDE drives possible on a home user scale?

dszd0g

Golden Member
Jun 14, 2000
1,226
0
0
I'm not sure that this is highly technical. GH would probably have been a better place to ask this. A quick search online would have found you some IDE RAID 5 solutions.

Here is the StorageReview review of the 3Ware Escalade 7450. As you can see from the review Raid 0+1, overall beats the performance of RAID 5.

However, RAID 0+1 wastes a lot more disk space than 0+1. 0+1 also provides a greater level of redundancy than RAID 5. That said, 0+1 is generally not economical and RAID 5 is quite popular (I run it on my Linux server). The performance and redundancy advantage of 0+1 is generally not worth it. I have only once had a system have two hard drives fail one right after the other. The second drive failed before the spare was built (Yes, the system even had a spare installed). None of us believed we had hit the one situation a RAID 5 system cannot recover from. I think it was just plain bad luck. We debated whether there was some sort of flaw in the detection of the first faulty drive. Generally, a RAID 5 system is plenty redundant. Two drive failures can take out a RAID 0+1 system too, if they are the drives that contain the same data. With a RAID 5 system, any two drives failing takes out the system. If you have a spare installed and the system can build the spare before the second drive fails, all is good (as long as a third drive doesn't fail).
 

Mday

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
18,647
1
81
we have a few users here who run raid5 on home machines. but they call them servers due to the tasks those computers are used for.

just a note that RAID levels can have more than just the base number of harddrives to improve performance\redundancy