Is RAID the solution to my problem?

[MDesigner]

Here's the deal. I work in audio/music, and have the need for a large drive (250GB+), but I need blazing fast drives without the SCSI price. The obvious solution is the WD Raptor 74GB. Problem is, it's only 74GB. I know very little about RAID, but if I use RAID, couldn't I link up three of these Raptors to make a 222GB drive that shows up as just one drive in my system?

 

[jvarszegi]

You could, and the cost would be around $550. You can't pick up a SCSI drive for that price? Also, what about two of these in RAID 0 with a mobo that supports NCQ? Give the partition a 32k or 64k cluster size and I can't imagine you'd have problems. Best thing about this particular drive is that it's about the best SATA value around now, at $112.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160827AS 160GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: MDesigner
Here's the deal. I work in audio/music, and have the need for a large drive (250GB+), but I need blazing fast drives without the SCSI price. The obvious solution is the WD Raptor 74GB. Problem is, it's only 74GB. I know very little about RAID, but if I use RAID, couldn't I link up three of these Raptors to make a 222GB drive that shows up as just one drive in my system?

Raid 0 would allow you to do that. Just make sure you back up often in case one drive fails on you. When you lose one drive in a Raid 0, you tend to lose all your data.

 

[MDesigner]

Originally posted by: jvarszegi
You could, and the cost would be around $550. You can't pick up a SCSI drive for that price? Also, what about two of these in RAID 0 with a mobo that supports NCQ? Give the partition a 32k or 64k cluster size and I can't imagine you'd have problems. Best thing about this particular drive is that it's about the best SATA value around now, at $112.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160827AS 160GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer

Yeah I guess the price makes it pointless. I could get a SCSI drive, 180GB for about $300.

Maybe I'll just stick with SATA 7200RPM then...

 

[uOpt]

I do RAID-0 with normal SATA drives. Works perfectly and gets you at PCI bus limit with three disks and no extra tuning effort anywhere. That is with Linux software-RAID.

Take note of above warning about data loss in RAID-0.

Generally - don't run RAID if you don't understand what it does.

 

[groovin]

if u need such a large drive you either need it for some kinda scratch space or are actually storing your files on it... either case, make sure you have your disk redundancy and backups taken care of!

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
I do RAID-0 with normal SATA drives. Works perfectly and gets you at PCI bus limit with three disks and no extra tuning effort anywhere. That is with Linux software-RAID.

Take note of above warning about data loss in RAID-0.

Generally - don't run RAID if you don't understand what it does.

These warnings are usually taken too seriously. Everybody should back up their important data as often as they need to, and as long as they do that they're fine; no need to back up more frequently on RAID 0. People say "but you have to remember that you lose all your data" etc. etc. Well, you'd lose all your data if a twice-as-big single drive failed, too. The only difference stability-wise in going to RAID 0 is a decreased MTBF which usually doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It's like the difference between a one-in-a-hundred-million and one-in-fifty-million chance of winning the lottery... it's just not a fun lottery to win.

To recap: back up your important data at a frequency dictated by the importance of the data, which you should do with ANY drive. Then, don't worry about it.

It's amazing how "wisdom" can be manufactured on sites like this...