To RAID or not?

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 6:12 am

Building a new system, and wondering what input I can get about a SATA RAID 0 + 1 system?

I'm confident enough in the capabilities of either P4 Northwood 3.2 -and- AMD 64 3200+ with a gig or RAM, ATI X800 PRO, and Audigy 2ZX.

So I'm thinking about building the system around the use 4 x 120GB SATA drives, as HDD is going to be by far the largest bottleneck.

I have some questions though:

1) How is managing a RAID aray? Better software than others?

2) Motherboard support? Any ideas on whether a native or add-in solution is best? Know any decent mobo's which natively support SATA RAID 0 + 1?

3) Scaling? How do I scale a system which is based on RAID 0 + 1? For my next upgrade (to HDDs with more than a terabyte each) - is the process of migrating drives going to hurt me?

4) Drive Failure: Is the process of rebuilding a RAID 0 + 1 array easy?

Thanks people.

Frosty5F11 · Post by **Frosty5F11** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 7:35 am

well I don't know about all those questions you just asked, probably cause I just woke up. but I just built a SATA Raid striping config & it flat out kicks ass! I read that raid doubled the performance recently, so I thought I'ld try it out & it's great. I got 2 7,500 seagate ATA 100 drives adapted to SATA via adapters & connected to my Asus a7n8x-e deluxe. which is built in.
I vouge for it being twice as fast!

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 8:52 am

It would be smarter to go with raid5 if you are going to run 4 drives Mobius. Striping + Mirroring works and gives you redundancy but it only gives you half the capacity of the four drives. RAID5 would give you the full capacity of thee of the four drives combined and still have protection from failure. There are plenty of Serial ATA RAID controllers that can handle a RAID5 out there.

ccb056 · Post by **ccb056** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 11:13 am

just go with raid 0 and do nightly backups to a server accross your lan

Capm · Post by **Capm** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 12:32 pm

Your next upgrade being drives with a terabyte each? Don't plan on upgrading for a while do you?

Just a note - If you go the AMD route, make sure you get the 939pin processors.

Vindicator · Post by **Vindicator** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 1:09 pm

Just get yourself some 10k rpm WD Raptors. That'll give you a nice speed boost compared to 7200rpm drives. Get some 250gb drives for mass storage and youre good to go.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sun Jun 27, 2004 2:49 pm

Next disk drive upgrade will be late 2006 or early 2007.

Seems like a plethora of options for RAID. Better do some reading!