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What do I need to go RAID?

F

foolfromhell

Senior member
I want 1 Terabyte of space (Yes, greedy. I know). I have more or less $240 to spend. The Seagate 1 TB drives are $260 while the 500GB WD drives are $99 each. Will it be possible to get a RAID card for less than $40? Anything else I need other than a RAID card?


Moved to Memory and Storage
Anandtech Moderator
Gillbot
 
What is your objective?

Speed? Redundancy? Both?

If you just want a lot of space, then you don't need RAID for that.

Unless you spend quite a bit on a serious RAID card, most of the time the most useful function of Mobo raid is RAID-1 which just mirrors your hard drive, which cuts your available space in half.

If you want to do raid-5 (good compromise of redundancy and speed) you should not do it unless you get a fairly serious RAID card which is not anywhere near $40.
 
Yeah...you can check your mobo's manual to see if it has RAID support. For your purposes, RAID 1 or Raid 0 will be your ideal choice.

RAID 0: The data you save to a RAID 0 array will be 'fragmented' across your two drives (two minimum). Thus, if one drive stops working, all your data will be lsot

Raid 1: Your data is copied twice, to both drives, thus if one drive fails, then you'll still have your data.

If you use RAID 1 (and you're getting two 500 GB drives) you'll effectively only have 500GB of data space because its being copied twice.

Hardware-wise you'll only need two of the same drives, but keep what I said in mind if you use RAID 1
 
Why not wait a month? The 1 TB drives will likely drop the $20 that you are budgeted for. It'll be a LOT easier to work with a single 1TB drive than play with RAID 0 or JBOD or such, trying to merge two 500 GB drives.
 
For a RAID array, you need two or more drives, and a RAID controller. The latter can be on your mobo or be a separate card.

 
Does this have to be 1TB of contiguous space? Why not just plug in two 500GB drives into two SATA channels and call it a day? Are you looking for speed (i.e. RAID 0)? What's your primary usage scenario? Hardcore gaming or working with large (like HDV) video files using a NLE?

If you are looking for a disk throughput boost while loading maps, you probably won't find 'much' of an improvement. But do give it a shot and share your results with us. If you have a weekend to spare, try a single-drive setup, a few benchmarks and then the RAID array.
 
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