RAID Decision

smckay · 25 Feb 2008 at 22:36

I have a load of old home movies, record collection and other data that I want to store on hdd's. In order to provide some security I want to RAID the drives;

1. As I will be using the drives as storage and read/write will be rare which is best RAID0+1 or RAID5?

2. I know about minimum number of disks but is there a maximum?

3. If the mobo offers RAID support is this better than a RAID card? Or is a card best?

4. Should I be looking at anything other than the above?

Thanks for reading

naro · 26 Feb 2008 at 03:43

It greatly depends on your budget.

Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 hdds and its common to see 4 hdds in a Raid 5 array. It would be better to use a hardware Raid controller if you would like to use Raid 5 but they don't come cheap.

Raid 0+1 requires a minimum of 4 hdds.

rpstewart · 26 Feb 2008 at 08:31

smckay said:
4. Should I be looking at anything other than the above?

What's your backup plan? RAID does not provide a backup, all it provides is hardware redundancy which allows you to keep working in the event of an HDD failure.

smckay · 26 Feb 2008 at 11:49

I will be backing up seperately to the RAID option, sounds like I want RAID5 but I will have to look into a RAID card, cost etc to see if its worth the cost

Energize · 26 Feb 2008 at 12:08

I don't see raid as suitable for this situation, if you are just creating an archive of stuff your better off just backing up the data.

Pandobear · 26 Feb 2008 at 12:23

I would agree that a raid array is probably a waste for this type of work. I use a Windows Home Server for the storage/usage of the data, and then seperately clone it, using Synctoy to a standard Vista machine on a daily basis. This provides me with the best of both worlds in regards to redundancy and backup. Hardware raid cards are expensive, with even the most basic costing in excess of the price of a 1TB drive. My solution would be to look at using a Windows Home Server with a minimum of 2 drives, and switching on content mirroring. This will give you the option of increasing your storage size as you wish, which is not easily done with a raid array. If you are absolutely determined to protect yourself from data loss, as I was, then have a second machine, or external drive to back it all up on.

naro · 27 Feb 2008 at 10:25

Once again, I think it depends greatly on your budget.

If you're on a low budget, I would suggest that you use Raid 1 with 2 hdds using your motherboard's Raid controller. In addition to this, you can get an external hdd enclosure with an eSATA interface to do a regular (weekly or monthly) back up of your Raid 1 array which stores your data.