Raid level

[hennessy1]

i have 6 drives 500gb each which raid level should i choose? 0,1,0+1?

 

[harobikes333]

... how secure do you want your information to be? /how big of a HDD do you want o create...

 

[hennessy1]

the biggest possibile i have alot of muisc, video, apps, files I want it to be secure so that if something does happen I can just recover quickly

 

[Captante]

Use 4 of the drives in RAID 0 + 1, then use the other two as stand-alone drives for backup storage ... 1 internal & 1 in a USB 2/Firewire external enclosure that you disconnect from the system after running your backup program.

 

[harobikes333]

well there are more than just 0,1,0+1 but it would be excessively expensive and it wouldn't be a very big HDD... I'd go 0+1 because of the redundancy.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[hennessy1]

well the reason i said only those is bc thats all my board supports

 

[harobikes333]

i was thinking of raid 5 also but not many people it seems are familiar with that ....

 

[Captante]

RAID 5 isn't as good an option as 0+1 because it offers lower performance & less redundancy ... the only advantage it holds is lower cost because it only requires 3 HD's to implement & since the OP already has 6 identical HD's thats not a consideration here.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[bwnv]

Safest would be to build 2 raid 5 arrays with 3 disks each and then mirror them. However this would only give you a net of 1TB. Only problem is that if you delete the wrong files, or get a virus it's now on both sets of disks. Best would be single raid5 with some kind of backup like a tape system.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Use RAID 5 w/ a hot spare. the other two disks use for redundant offline periodic backups. /2 cents

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: harobikes333
i was thinking of raid 5 also but not many people it seems are familiar with that ....

replace the word people, with n00bs . (or those who haven't discovered google, and may be illiterate...*shrug*)

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: ch33zw1z
Use RAID 5 w/ a hot spare. the other two disks use for redundant offline periodic backups. /2 cents

Best suggestion I've heard yet.

Exactly how much space do you need? Options might be RAID 6 with a backup. RAID 5 with hot spare & backup. RAID 5 & backup.

Do you have any other backup solution available?

And if you want to do RAID seriously, get a good controller.

 

[Roguestar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

You should probably do a lot of reading if you're that serious about this, OP.