Hard Drives in a RAID config.

A

Africaner

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Hello every body. I want to replace my hard drive in my pc. I see the motherboard offers me the possibility to use RAID 0 with up to 6 drives. I have decided to go for RAID10 though. The question is - which 6 drives should I purchase? I want speed and it must not be more then 4K and it must have around 1TB total space.
Thatnk you.
 
If you want to use six HDD's I would suggest you look at creating a RAID1 (mirror) array with the first two drives, then the second two drives, and then the last two drives. (if the motherboard's RAID software can support that).

So it will look like this :

HDD0+HDD1=RAID1
HDD2+HDD3=RAID1
HDD4+HDD5=RAID1

Then you can span (RAID0) the three RAID1 arrays.

This will give you a bit of redundancy. Gotcha is if, say, HDD2 and HDD3 fail at the same time, you will lose everything.
 
I think OP is asking which drive are suitable for RAID operation. Such drives must ignore uncorrectable errors, leaving correction to RAID. Otherwise read/write delays on weak sectors can cause that such drive will be removed from the array. It means frequent user intervention required.
 
What's your reason for running 6 drives in RAID?

RAID 10 would work just fine with 4x 1TB drives.

There are better RAID levels in terms of total HDD space, such as RAID 5, 6 or z. Unfortunately most motherboards don't support those RAID configurations, which would mean that you'll have to run it in software mode, which usually results in slow write speeds.

Like I'm currently running Ubuntu with software RAID 5 over 4x low power 2TB drives, which gives me about 5.7TB of usuable space. My read speeds are in exceess 100MB/s, but my write speeds are below 25MB/s, since my HP Proliant Microserver N36L's CPU isn't powerful enough. Now with RAID 5 you only have 1 HDD's worth of redundancy.
 
Also remember that if your motherboard fails(or you replace replace it) it's going to be a big problem to get your data back.

Rather get a SSD for speed and regular drives for space.
 
Pada said:
What's your reason for running 6 drives in RAID?

RAID 10 would work just fine with 4x 1TB drives.

There are better RAID levels in terms of total HDD space, such as RAID 5, 6 or z. Unfortunately most motherboards don't support those RAID configurations, which would mean that you'll have to run it in software mode, which usually results in slow write speeds.

Like I'm currently running Ubuntu with software RAID 5 over 4x low power 2TB drives, which gives me about 5.7TB of usuable space. My read speeds are in exceess 100MB/s, but my write speeds are below 25MB/s, since my HP Proliant Microserver N36L's CPU isn't powerful enough. Now with RAID 5 you only have 1 HDD's worth of redundancy.
Click to expand...

Thank you for all the inputs. Raid 5 (or 6 for that matter) is not a option because it has reduncy but is to slow. SSD won't work because it is to expensive for the amount of space it gives me. I like the idea of combining the RAID0 with RAID1 (2drives x 3) Speed is important but so is space. 4 x 1TB drives sounds OK too. I am still learning a lot about the issue. The MB is a oldish EX-58 UDR-3. It gives me 6 x Intel connections and 2 x connections thru the Gigabyte interface chip. At first I wanted to RAID 0 the 2 x Gigabyte connections with 2 x 500GB Velociraptor drives but the total speed might suffer because the extra step (Via chip from Gigabyte) I will use that for a later 2 x 3TB (or 4TB) drives as a slow but huge drive. I thought 4 x 250GB in a RAID configuration connected direct to the Intel South Bridge chip, might do just fine even on a slower overall bus speed (SATA-2) What do you chaps think? What can I buy for 4000Rand in 250GB (or 500GB)?
 
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