Raids and whatnot...

[Ironcat]

Okay, as some of you may or may not remember, I am in the process of building the current version of my dream computer.
I watched for sales, I did rebates, yada yada yada, and I now have 3 Seagate 160Gb Internal SATA HDs.

I had originally decided to put them all in and have more space than I would ever ever need (trust me, I will have a hard time filling one and never fill 2 of these things...) anyway, now I am hearing about raid setups using more than 1 HD as a single drive.

My question is... do I want to put all 3 in or will that use too much resources? Would my raid setup be better with 2 or 3 of the drives? Or should I just stick with 1 ?

[AKA_RA]

I seriously want to know how many people opened this thread thinking they were gonna get some "phat loot" on their WoW server. lol.

also, dont say things like that, they happen, its scarey. i filled my 160 one day and i looked to see what junk i could delete. there wasn't any -_-

i think what you would want to do is a regular ol' RAID setup, either 1 or 0. hoestly, i dont know which is which, never had the cash to buy 2 drives worthy of raid, but i know that one involves cutting data in half for speed the other mirrors it to both drives for redundancy. if you had 4 drives, you could do both and have a 0+1. or however they put it. there are also other types of raid arrays, but i think you would want the one that makes it go fast. ^_^

[DaveW]

I'd recommend making a 12 Gig partition on one of the drives. This will almost always be put on the outer edge of the drive, which means for a single turn of the disc, you need to move the arm the least possible amount to get the largest possible amount of data. (i.e. the sweetpoint.) This is your OS partition, which is going to be fast as hell. The remainder of this drive is great for software and games.

Raiding your other 2 drives together makes a great place for file storage, such as movies, MP3's, etc.

I have a setup similar to this, except with a tiny 6gig partition on the slowest part of the drive where i keep word documents and backups of this site. As i hardly ever use it, and i don't need it to be fast, it keeps this part of the disk away from the things that i want to load with a reasonable speed (things like my software).

I can tell you now that it works and it's a very, very, effective way to keep your drives organized.

-Dave

[Airbozo]

I agree with DaveW's answer. I currently have my gaming rig installed on a raid 0 setup with 2 160gb sata's. It works fine, but the speed increase was negligible except for the loading of certain databases, cad programs and music/movie files. Next time I install (have to reinstall at least twice a year) I will be following DaveW's suggestions as to the partition setup.

I would recommend deciding what the real purpose of this rig will be and set it up from there. If you will be using it for any important data, you could use the 3 drives in a raid5 setup, with one drive being the parity drive. This will allow for a single disk failure with no loss of data (also look at raid 0+1). The web server I built here at work uses a combination of raid 0 and 1. I like to mirror the main drive in case of a HW failure, but am not concerned with speed. On the data array, I am not so much concerned with data loss as I am speed, so it is raid 0 (I do backups religiously). The system itself is a HA cluster, which means the whole system can die and another system will take over with no hiccups.

This site has a REALLY good graphical representation of the different raid levels with _great_ explanations of each raid level and what they are used for;
http://www.acnc.com/04_00.html

[ajmilton]

I seriously want to know how many people opened this thread thinking they were gonna get some "phat loot" on their WoW server. lol.


:(

*raises hand*

my first thought was, aq or zg? (thats what my guild's just recently got on farm :P)

[Ironcat]

Okay,
Now I talked to someone else who says that since...
A: I am just going for speed
B: All my data will be replaceable and not too important
C: But I still don't want to lose it because it's a pin to reinstall everything

That I should not RAID at all... Just go with 1 HD, and when and if I need more room, to add the next, and so on.

If a RAID 0 fails in one disk, I lose everything, if I run them as separate ddrives, i am reallly not sacrificing any speed and I have a second drive to run off of if I have a failure.