Raid 5 question

[Anubis]

ok because im so tired of haveing HDs crash and looseing data, im just gonna go ahead and do this i think, just wanna make sure i got this all correct

- all drives same size / type
- at least 3 of them
- if i loose one i pop in a new one data is recovered
- no real preformance loss

im gonna keep windows on its own drive


is there anything else im missing? no someone will say just back up your data, and i woudl do that but with over 400GB of crap backing it up is a pain in the ass and i like haveing it on my comp, and it changes so often that im always burning DVDs

 

[BigFatCow]

thats pretty much it, are you planning on using IDE or SCSI?

 

[Anubis]

IDE,

i dont need the speed of scsi, i just need to NOT LOOSE DATA

and i cant aford SCSI

 

[BigFatCow]

What card are you planning on getting? I have a Promise Fast track SX4000 and it works pretty good when i can get it to work. (see my thread i just started)

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: BigFatCow
What card are you planning on getting? I have a Promise Fast track SX4000 and it works pretty good when i can get it to work. (see my thread i just started)

thats what i was planning on getting if the card i currently have wont cut it

and i have seen your thread, and dont like teh not booting issue you are haveing

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: BigFatCow
What card are you planning on getting? I have a Promise Fast track SX4000 and it works pretty good when i can get it to work. (see my thread i just started)

thats what i was planning on getting if the card i currently have wont cut it

and i have seen your thread, and dont like teh not booting issue you are haveing

Well to be fair the card worked great in my k7s5a so i think its just a compatibility issue with the A7N8X.

 

[Anubis]

i have a AN35U, hopefully ill be OK

my current card wont cut it just checked, itll be a lil while before i do this anyway, wanted to make sure i got it all right before i did

planning on going 3 or 4x 160-200GB depending on if I find a HD before i order them, run windows off a 40 or 80 gig

 

[Dewey]

You got it. I have a 3ware SATA card. I have 4 200GB drives on the array. I had 3 fail separately, but all during one month. With each failure I powered it off and swapped out the drive and told the software to rebuild the array. I even tested to see that I could still access the information with the 1 bad drive.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Anubis
ok because im so tired of haveing HDs crash and looseing data, im just gonna go ahead and do this i think, just wanna make sure i got this all correct

- all drives same size / type
- at least 3 of them
- if i loose one i pop in a new one data is recovered
- no real preformance loss

im gonna keep windows on its own drive


is there anything else im missing? no someone will say just back up your data, and i woudl do that but with over 400GB of crap backing it up is a pain in the ass and i like haveing it on my comp, and it changes so often that im always burning DVDs

And of course, keep in mind, you lose one drive's worth of storage space for the parity information - 4 200GB drives, you get 600GB usable.
In terms of performance, you should see an increase if anything - that's if you get a hardware card. RAID 5's parity calculations are processor intensive; some cards do all of this processing on the board itself. The SX4000 has some kind of XOR-assist CPU on it or something like that, if that's the right acronym, could be way off. But its CPU utilization is still low - it doesn't even register in Taskmanager on my XP1700@1.7GHz, and that's with 4 drives.
Thus far I've not had a problem with the thing - SX4000 and 4 160GB Hitachi drives. Give Windows 10-20GB, and divvy the rest of it up into other partitions.


Having the array can give peace of mind - I use Second Copy 2000 to run an automated backup every night, across the network, to the RAID 5 array. Now, all that can really kill my data is a massive power surge.