HD clarity

TiNcAn

Right. I'm thinking of getting another 1tb HD and currently have a 1tb seagate barracua 7200.12 . I was wondering if I should get another seagate and put them in a raid configuration for increased performance but...

1. I am unsure of the various raid configurations and what the benefits and drawbacks of each are.

2. Is it safe to put in a raid configuration, how often would a hard drive break down if in raid0 configuration? (never/sometimes/often)??

Would it be better for me to get another higher performance hard drive which I am unsure what that is... maybe a Spinpoint F3???

Sorry for so many questions just that am taking a new approach to buying my tech equipment by asking for opinions rather than trawling the internet.
Any help is appreciated.

THX

Spacedog

I think it's a safe guess that a typical modern single hard drive will fail unrecoverably once in 10 years. (based on personal experience and that of friends).

raid 0 will double that risk with 2 drives and quadruple it with three, etc. every time you add a drive you double your risk of one bad apple trashing your entire data set.

for this reason, never keep any data you can't live without on a raid 0 array without regular backups. aid 5 is also a better solution for more than 3 drives as it offers speed and redundency.

never count on 2 drives not failing at the same time, power spikes or malfunctioning UPS'es will embarrass you.

my advice is keeping OS high speed required apps on array and data and media on single or external disk with regular backups.

if you can't afford good backups, I find sharing movies and music with friends means they keep and enjoy a redundent copy and I can eventually get most of my stuff back from the sneakernet.

I run a raid 0 array with a couple of mid range SSDs, everything loads in the blink of an eye and it is easily faster than a single top range SSD. the trade off is the additional risk which I'm willing to take because my precious horse porn collection is stored externally, backed up and shared with friends and family. (hi mum!)

TiNcAn

Thx Spacedog thats pretty helpful. So you say raid 5 is a better solution that raid0 for reliability but what are the performance increases that you can expect to achieve with raid0 vs raid 5 or any raid vs non raid for that matter.

You also seem to be leaning heavily towards raid aswell which lends me to believe that you would choose another seagate drive instead of another faster hard drive?
and can you hook me up with some of the horse porn, I'm glued to the stuff.

massy086

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flvxbw8YYM8

Spacedog

"Po-po's Out, peanut-butter-jellytime horseporn!!!"

Spacedog

TiNcAn wrote: »

Thx Spacedog thats pretty helpful. So you say raid 5 is a better solution that raid0 for reliability but what are the performance increases that you can expect to achieve with raid0 vs raid 5 or any raid vs non raid for that matter.

You also seem to be leaning heavily towards raid aswell which lends me to believe that you would choose another seagate drive instead of another faster hard drive?
and can you hook me up with some of the horse porn, I'm glued to the stuff.

everything you'd ever want to know is on the wiki...

RAID WIKI

The goal of RAID is to improve disk speed, SSD technology easily pisses all over raided hard drives for access time.

if you need the space and accept the increased risk of data loss, get Disk and RAID

if your goal is lightning fast loading OS, apps and game maps get a 64/128MB SSD

RAID has some drawbacks compared to a norman stand alone disk configuration. you need drivers to use the array drive space, this can cause complications if you are a Linux user and drivers are not available for your raid chipset.

On the other hand it's good experience to set up arrays at home. if you find yourself working in IT it's nice to know the basics of disk optimisation beforehand.