Clarification on RAID hard drive setup.

[Veyne]

My beast of a computer is coming along nicely, and in a month's time I should have the money to grab my high end graphics card. After that, my last component to worry about is my hard drives. It's taken me several months to get that graphics card because I've also been working on paying off a couple major, unexpected things that have popped up (a car accident that, legally, was my fault, but the person who hit me HAD to have been speeding, we'll not get into it, and another entirely convoluted scenario not even worth mentioning...), but this is my final month paying both of them off, and in actuality, I have more disposable income than income that has to go towards bills and necessities, so I'll be upgrading my Hard Drive setup in pretty big ways and pretty quickly.

I'm thinking about rocking out a RAID 0 across four 3TB hard drives (it seems like no matter how big a hard drive I get, and expect to never fill it up, it gets full within a year's time), plus a 240 GB Solid State Hard Drive.

The question is, after reading some stuff on RAID 0, I get the impression that it uses all of the drives simultaneously to increase throughput speeds. I read that there's no mirror redundancy. What I'm hoping for is that, and this is the impression that I'm getting, the four hard drives will work as a single, massive 12 TB drive.

Is my understanding of RAID 0 correct? I want massive storage, but I don't want to have to deal with multiple partitions and multiple drive letters, etc...

I'm hoping to use my SSD as my system drive, plus the drive I'll use to play my serious MMOs and other online games, and my 4 3TB drives will be used for general game/media/document storage, plus where I'll be saving my audio and video projects on.

(sorry for yet another long-winded post that probably would've been just as effective with 1-2 paragraphs... >_>)

[Infinity1337]

You could do that, but with RAID-0 you're getting no redundancy. So while yes you'd have no more than a couple of "drive letters" if one of those drives goes bad, they all go bad.

What I would say since you say you have enough income, is maybe look at building a second computer as a server. Basically make it a NAS or essentially a media server. That way, if you're doing something like frapsing, you could be sending it to the server next to you instead of having your computer do everything locally.

Some of the big streamers actually make an RTMP server that will compress/save/and stream all of their stuff so its not done locally. They can do all of that because its being pushed to another computer. It's not overly complicated, but a little Linux magic and its done.

I have this set up in my home. I host VMware ESXi box that basically runs a few Virtual Machines that serve a few different purposes throughout the home.

Anyways, I hope I was able to open your eyes to some of your other options as well

[Entrophius]

So you want one massive drive with everything on it instead of having to switch between the drives in the file browser? Yes it should work (I got very limited experience with RAID configs) as you keep the combined capacity, but if one of the drives go down, everything will be lost. Myself I would not use RAID 0 for any kind of storage because of the risc, I'd rather just run them without any RAID at all, but it comes down to what you want to store on them.

[Veyne]

I kept researching a little after posting, and I looked into RAID 5. It's confusing the hell out of me. From what I gather, if I have 4 drives, It stripes the data across all 4 drives, but then has the data in parity across all 4 drives as well, making it easier to recover from corruption. Does this mean I'll have 6 GB worth of storage and parity going on at the same time?

There seems to be a decent bit of risk involved in RAID 0 that I'm not sure if I'm willing to take with the amount of money I'm willing to invest in the setup. I'm thinking of just dealing with having separate drives with no RAID configuration at all and dealing with it, and in that way I only have to worry about buying another one of them when I fill the capacity of the current ones.

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And just to throw this out there, I'm not trying to sound all "I have more money than you," if anyone's has gotten that impression. I just don't have too many expenses to worry about in life yet. No new car payment, no huge rent payment, minimal bills to worry about. I've spent the last 4 years gradually transitioning from social butterfly to overweight recluse since I started taking classes in graphics/programming, and my parents live near my current job, so I'm taking advantage of super cheap rent living with them while I work on getting this weight off to regain the confidence to return to the social scene. 40 pounds in 2.5 months and still dropping fast! Hells yeah! Might as well use my disposable money to setup an awesome computer for the first time in my life that I should only have to worry about major upgrades once every 5-6 years or so.

[Deleted]

I'd personally go RAID 5 over those 4 drives using ICH10R (assuming you're Intel with a suitable Mobo), it will offer you N-1 redundancy, and (N-1) read* write* performance with caveats**. Monitor the raid array using Intel RST (Windows) or mdadm (Linux), whichever you're using.

[mojo6912]

I went a little HD bonkers as well. I ended up getting 2x SSD in RAID 0 (OS and main games), 2x WD Black in RAID 0 (more games and programs), and 4x 2TB WD green/red in RAID 5 (data) that are in a seperate RAID enclosure that has almost 6GB usable space. You get more than half in RAID 5.

I have the Hardware RAID tower connected via USB3.0 to my router so it is basically a DAS (direct attached storage) turned into a NAS (network attached storage).

[chazus]

Why exactly are you wanting to use a RAID? Really the only situation to want RAID anymore is for RAID5 redundancy. 4x3 TB drives will give you 9TB, I believe.

[Veyne]

Why exactly are you wanting to use a RAID? Really the only situation to want RAID anymore is for RAID5 redundancy. 4x3 TB drives will give you 9TB, I believe.

I briefly touched on why in my original post. I'm a bit of a neat freak when it comes to how things are stored on my system. I'd hate to open My Computer and see 5 individual drives (SSD + 4 HDDs) to sort through.

But I'm beginning to suppose that I'll just deal with it and come up with a specific storage scheme to keep up with where I put everything, unless there's a way I can have my hard drives set up in a "virtual" (for lack of a better word to use) single drive.

It's a silly reason, I know, but hey. I'm silly.

In the end, I don't like the risk of RAID 0 (I've had enough hard drives mess on me over the years to know I don't want 1 out of 4 hard drives go out and effectively mess up my other 3 drives), and I don't want to lose 1 hard drive worth of actual storage capacity if I go with RAID 5.

[chazus]

In the end, I don't like the risk of RAID 0 and I don't want to lose 1 hard drive worth of actual storage capacity if I go with RAID 5.

A RAID option is not the solution for you then, unfortunately. There really is no way to create a 'single logical' drive without either risking failure across all drives, or using some kind of partial redundancy.

[chazus]

Why not just mount your HDDs as folders? You can mount your "D" drive at ~/my documents, E at ~/my pictures, etc.

That's true. It would limit any one folder to the drive's size, but it still an option.

[Irloki]

Check out Flexraid. It is a software raid that has been amazing for me so far.

[NithonKT]

Since you have 4 identical drives just do a RAID 10 if it is supported by your RAID controller, you have redundancy (RAID 1) and speed (RAID 0).
Of course that will leave you with about 6 GB of total space with the capacity of your HDDs.

[vesseblah]

In the end, I don't like the risk of RAID 0 (I've had enough hard drives mess on me over the years to know I don't want 1 out of 4 hard drives go out and effectively mess up my other 3 drives), and I don't want to lose 1 hard drive worth of actual storage capacity if I go with RAID 5.

Are you OK then with the risk of one of the discs breaking and losing you 3TB of data if you use the four drives without RAID5, that is the important question you need to figure out.

[Deleted]

Are you OK then with the risk of one of the discs breaking and losing you 3TB of data if you use the four drives without RAID5, that is the important question you need to figure out.

Indeed, you have to decide if you want some form or redundancy or not. If you keep backups of your data and you can afford to lose everything in the event of a disk failure then you could set them up as a stripe to maximise storage space. Remember that keeping backups manually may end up using just as much storage space as you lose from going RAID.

If you can't afford to lose data, you need to decide upon which level of redundancy you require. RAID 5 will tolerate a single drive failure and is a good compromise between storage space versus fault tolerance versus performance.

If you want to be able to tolerate two simultaneous drive failures you'd need to run at least 4 drives in a 2/2 stripe/mirror configuration.

Decide what you want and pick an option:
- Maximum performance (roughly N) and maximum storage space (N) with zero fault tolerance and risk of total data loss from a single failure? RAID 0
- Very good performance (roughly N-1) and good storage space (N-1) with a single fault tolerance? RAID 5
- Roughly double the performance of a single drive with half the storage space (N/2) and double fault tolerance? RAID 1+0 with 4 drives minimum

Edit: in fact even the 2:2 stripe/mirror will only tolerate two drive failures if they are both on the same side of the mirror so this can only really guarantee a single drive failure. Probably not worth considering this option.

[Veyne]

I'll have an external for backup of all my important documents, project files/folders, etc... So I guess redundancy's a non-issue.

[pvrwizard]

Are you OK then with the risk of one of the discs breaking and losing you 3TB of data if you use the four drives without RAID5, that is the important question you need to figure out.

In raid 0 if one drive fails the entire raid fails and all 12GB if fully used is lost. In raid 5 you get 9TBG of space that if one drive fails you can rebuild the failed drive. I would almost recommend just going JBOD in this case. it sounds like the 12gb is just storage and doesn't really need huge performance. JBOD makes all of the drives appear as one huge drive but if one drive fails you then only lose the data on that drive. each individual drive can be read independently if needed to get the data off. If you have some sort of back system available that backs everything up routinely then just go Raid 0. BUT make damned sure that you do a test backup and restore every so often to make sure what you THINK is getting backed up.. really IS getting backed up.

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I briefly touched on why in my original post. I'm a bit of a neat freak when it comes to how things are stored on my system. I'd hate to open My Computer and see 5 individual drives (SSD + 4 HDDs) to sort through.

But I'm beginning to suppose that I'll just deal with it and come up with a specific storage scheme to keep up with where I put everything, unless there's a way I can have my hard drives set up in a "virtual" (for lack of a better word to use) single drive.

It's a silly reason, I know, but hey. I'm silly.

In the end, I don't like the risk of RAID 0 (I've had enough hard drives mess on me over the years to know I don't want 1 out of 4 hard drives go out and effectively mess up my other 3 drives), and I don't want to lose 1 hard drive worth of actual storage capacity if I go with RAID 5.

then what you want to do is just create them as a JBOD "Just a Bunch of Disks" all four drives will be seen as one large drive. data is written until the first hard drive is full then it starts on the second drive then the third etc etc. files do not span across the hard drives. you can take a drive from a jbod and put it in another computer and access the files directly. if a jbod drive fails you can still access everything that's on the other drives.