Advice on RAID0 set up

Pugwash69

I wanted lots of storage with no fault tolerence too, but I bought a rack mount case with lots of drive bays and installed Windows Server 2003 on it. I created a spanned drive that I can expand as I need to, and if one drive (full of replaceable data) fails I can remove it from the spanned set.

It's a software solution but I get maybe 70Mb/s transfer rates on a gigabit network, and have 7TB available.

The main advantage for me is that it's accessible from any machine in the house, so if I store video on it from a desktop, I can watch it back from a laptop or video streaming thing under the TV.

Dussed

Pugwash69 wrote: »

I wanted lots of storage with no fault tolerence too, but I bought a rack mount case with lots of drive bays and installed Windows Server 2003 on it. I created a spanned drive that I can expand as I need to, and if one drive (full of replaceable data) fails I can remove it from the spanned set.

It's a software solution but I get maybe 70Mb/s transfer rates on a gigabit network, and have 7TB available.

The main advantage for me is that it's accessible from any machine in the house, so if I store video on it from a desktop, I can watch it back from a laptop or video streaming thing under the TV.

I'm not sure this'd be feasible for playing games though.

RobertoMoir

Dussed wrote: »

Go on youtube, search "SSD Awesomeness".
and before you say it, no, I don't want to go that far.

I work in IT and deal with RAID arrays and the consequences of people choosing the wrong one day in and day out. I've got very little interest in what some cretin has uploaded to youtube because that's not going to change the inherent unreliability of RAID 0.

paddyrg

RobTang wrote: »

What if the question is: How do I get faster read/writes and all my important data is backuped to a raid-6 nas and / or clould or consisits of data I dont care about losing ie steam games.

Heh heh good question. I'd counter if you don't care about keeping/losing the data, why not just delete the valueless files as opposed to hoarding 1's and 0's you don't need? ;-)

RobTang

paddyrg wrote: »

Heh heh good question. I'd counter if you don't care about keeping/losing the data, why not just delete the valueless files as opposed to hoarding 1's and 0's you don't need? ;-)

Oh I still need the data, I can just afford to loose it, eg the windows swap file, working copies from video editing etc. or data that is backed up or inherently backed up, ie Steam if I lose the drive I can just re-download all my games, I lose about 30-40mins it takes to download somthing rest i can leave overnight and it would take much longer to re-build an array.

Dussed

I think it may actually just be worth me buying a new hdd or two now. From what everyone's said it's put me off of RAID0 a bit.

bluesnake

fwor wrote: »

...It seems that you really need a dedicated hardware-based device for good results, and even then you can be in real trouble if the controller dies, as there is no precise standard for how the disk should be written to (i.e. if you can't get the same make/model of controller you may not be able to recover).

It does not seem to stop there either. My friend brought a Drobo, or Qnap 4 disk unit. It was quicly replaced when it became faulty, just now would not recognise the dold date on the disks even when they were placed back in the same order. The guy was as to reformat his array.

Also with cheap raid systems you can't easily expand, however ZFS may offer some beneficial options.

The one I like is a NAS, but do not want to spend £300 on a case is UNRAID by lime technolgies - Their usb key does a raid 4-ish system that is both expandable and recoverable. You are even able to take out indevidual disk and mount them elsewhere to get your files off, should one have a colossal crash.

RobertoMoir

bluesnake wrote: »

It does not seem to stop there either. My friend brought a Drobo, or Qnap 4 disk unit. It was quicly replaced when it became faulty, just now would not recognise the dold date on the disks even when they were placed back in the same order. The guy was as to reformat his array.
.

It's always worth remembering that RAID is not a backup...

esuhl

RobertoMoir wrote: »

It's always worth remembering that RAID is not a backup...

Which is ironic, given that the first two letters stand for "redundant array...". You'd expect redundancy to act as a backup... but in RAID 0 there is no redundancy!

It's another IT acronym that doesn't make sense!

OGR

esuhl wrote: »

Which is ironic, given that the first two letters stand for "redundant array...". You'd expect redundancy to act as a backup... but in RAID 0 there is no redundancy!

It's another IT acronym that doesn't make sense!

Thinking about redundancy in any way as a form of backup is probably a bad idea, it is just there to give you a few hours to get things replaced in the event of a failure.

For me I have never really seen the use of any kind of RAID setup outside of a workplace environment as necessary. If a server loses a PSU or HDD and goes off then that has the ability to affect a whole company but a home desktop/laptop HDD failing at worst is a loss of data if you haven't been backing up. Windows 7 installs so quickly that in a worst case scenario you can have things back up in no time at all.