Re: RAID array for home


"Synapse Syndrome" <synapse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"xmas" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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After a recent drive failure, I want to set up a RAID array at home both
for speed of data access and redundancy. Never set one up before, but
would like to do it in hardware rather than relying on Windows: any
recommendations?


Having spent a couple of evenings trying to sort out an issue with a RAID1
array on a friends machine, can I echo the "don't do it". I don't think most
of the desktop raid cards have the quality of software thats needed for
reliable performance. In addition, I can't see much point unless you also
have a "hot spare" in case a drive fails. If you don't do this, when a drive
fails what do you do? How long are you going to run for in degraded mode?
What about backups? What about performance while re-building afater a drive
has failed.



For speed *and* redundancy, you would ideally want RAID-5, which involves
3+ drives and an expensive controller. It would be nice if you had loads
of money, but it's normally only used in servers and really high-end
workstations.


RAID-5 perforformance is worse that RAID 0+1. In general these days its
bottom of my list. Even in normal mode the performance is worse than 0+1. In
degraded mode (i.e. when running witrh a failed drive) its write performance
is appalling, and when re-building after replacing a failed drive you might
as well not bother....

I have two WD Raptor hard drives in 'Matrix RAID' which allows you to have
both RAID-0 and RAID-1 partitions on the same pair of drives. I think
this is only available on Intel chipsets.

RAID 0+1 needs four disks and seems wasteful to me.


But it allows the i/o to be spread over twice as many spindles, much faster
than raid 5...

ss.



.

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