raid adapter question

[Dorkenstein]

I was under the impression that a dedicated raid adapter was preferable when doing raid over the built-in motherboard equivalent, if you have it.

I took one step in consolidating my data by getting a Hitachi 2tb drive. I am going to get one more of those but also 2 x Samsung F3 500gb drives for my games in RAID 0.

So, my two questions are:

1) Which RAID card should I be looking for?

2) Is there any point in doing RAID for the 2 x 2tb drives which will be storage/backup?

Thanks!

 

[fleshconsumed]

If you're doing RAID0 integrated intel controller is totally fine (if you're doing Intel).

People recommend RAID card for RAID5/6 where RAID card has to calculate parity information. For RAID 0 ICHR9/10 will perform just dandy.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Ok, cool. I would just say 'forget it' and get an ssd, but none of them have the capacity for all my games without costing fortunes.

 

[corkyg]

I prefer a dedicated adapter that has its own BIOS and controller. As for your 2X2TG data drives, I would put them in a RAID 1 array, not for "backup" but for planned redundancy. That is what I do with 2X500GB drives - and then they are in turned backed up on an external USB drive.

On board RAID can do it, but I like to see and control the separate BIOS load on boot.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Is it possible to use on-board for the Samsungs in RAID 0 and an adapter for the Hitachi drives in RAID 1?

 

[Nothinman]

For home use I generally prefer software RAID, it's a lot more flexible and these days host CPUs are more than fast enough to deal with the parity calculations.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Is software raid the same as onboard?

 

[Emulex]

nehalem cpu's have crc calc specific for soft-raid build into them now.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Hmm, I don't have a nehalem.

 

[Nothinman]

Is software raid the same as onboard?

Technically yes, since all the work is done in the driver. However, I was talking about the software RAID built into Linux, largely because it's controller independent.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Is it possible to use on-board for the Samsungs in RAID 0 and an adapter for the Hitachi drives in RAID 1?

Yes you should be able to.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Will I need to format my existing 2tb drive of whatever is on it once I get the other one? Not sure if RAID requires that. Thanks.

 

[Dorkenstein]

In addition to my last question, I just thought of another. If I use 2 x 500gb drives in Raid 0 for games, and it's always a good idea to back up a Raid 0 array, what should I use for storage to back up my games array and how should I be doing it? The 2 x 2tb drives would already be doing backup but I don't know if there'll be room for literally everything. Thanks for any ideas.