What is the best way to set up RAID?

Question

I am looking to build a new gaming system and just got a hold of 4 750gb seagate hard drives and I am comparing different RAID configurations. I first thought raid 10 (0+1) was the best (I am looking both for stability as well as performance), but looking at benchmarks, it looks like raid 10 is hardly faster than a single drive, and definitely slower than raid 0. My question is, would it be better to set up a raid 10 array, or simply make two raid 0 arrays, one as the master, and one as a byte for byte bootable backup that will update automatically once a week or so overnight to prevent errors and thus provide the backup if any failures were to occur?

Answer 1

RAID 0 does not provide any fault tolerance, it only improves speeds. Actually, it creates more risks; if one hard drive fails, all data on the RAID 0 is lost. RAID 10 offers the fault tolerance of RAID 1 and the speed of RAID 0, but it is not efficient; you require four hard drives, but only the hard drive space of two hard drives will be usable. RAID 10 is not slower than RAID 0 as you believe. RAID 10 is just as fast as a RAID 0 set up. I would suggest a RAID 5 set up though. It does not improve speeds, but it does provide proper fault tolerance. One hard drive of your four hard drives may fail and you would still have all your data safe. A last remark, implement a hardware RAID if possible instead of a software RAID. The first is faster and works independently of your operating system.

Answer 2

Best bet for speed and performance would be raid 4. It reads nearly as fast as raid 0, but writes more slowly because parity is stored on the first drive to provide for recovery from failures.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/guides/misc_mod/raid_explained/

Answer 3

what are you looking at benchmarks for? games? cause raid doesnt really effect that. or are you looking at read/write?



anyways, 1+0 would be the best. it would be stupid to have another raid 0.



heres what i would do if it were me. i would set 3 up in raid 0 and use the 4th for back of things that i care about. like movies, docs, music etc. i personally dont care about backing up installed programs as installers them selfs are backed up or i still have the media. and im pretty good about backing things up. again, just what i would do.

Answer 4

Stabilty? I think you mean safety/data-security.



Keep in mind that mirrored raid stores data securely but that's not enough. You need a system-backup (or several). Even when data is stored securely on your computer there may be data-corruption because of for instance a virus, a failed installation, or any softwareconflict. A securely stored infected/corrupted system realy isn't very usefull. So secure data storage should be related to it's use. For instance a server, that needs to be always available, could use mirrored raid to make sure it keeps functioning when 1 hdd fails, but even then it still would need a "known to be good" systembackup in case of data-corruption. If you don't have a server (a computer that for instance services an internetsite) or it's only a casual server and you don't mind it being offline for a while, then secure data-storage for the system itself isn't needed. What is needed is a good "known to be good" system backup (or a set like for instance 1 or more backups that you know is/are ok but not very up to date, and 1 or more up to date backups that may however contain data-corruption)



I have no experiance with complicated raid solutions so i can only say that i would put the operating system on a fast hdd, and make sure i had a system backup i know is good, and also make sure the user-data is stored safely. Mirrored raid would be good for the storage of user-data (like movies) or backups, these, in contrast to operating systems, are not so vulnerable to corruption, although they also could get corrupted in some cases. On the other hand it might be even safer to just use the hdd's seperately to store double backup's.



A possible gaming-computer setup with your 4 hdd's:



- Put 2 hdd's in raid 0 for fast performance and a 1.5Tb storage capasity.

- Use this storage space for dedicated operating system partitions (including dedicated windows gaming cores), a shared swapfile-partition, and a dedicated data partition.

- Use the 3rd hdd externally and use about 1 half of it for a backup of your data-partition (1 backup should be enough since you also have a copy on the computer, for data backups maybe also consider "normal" operating system based backup-software and incremental backups) and the other half for the 1 copy of your most essential system-backups in the shape of compressed partition images.

- Use the 4th hdd also externally and place there a 2nd copy of your most essential system backups and maybe some extra up to date system backups.



I wrote a crude gaming-computer system setup guide here:

https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20110227093217AAE403a