Raid

>>60058286
Decide what you want it for. RAID is supposed to provide redundancy first, and the speed aspect is an afterthought. It's there to make sure you don't lose access to the live copy of your data.

Level 1 is mirroring, and while it's possible for it to provide read speedups, I've never seen an implementation where it does. It's as fast as your slowest disk, and gives you the chance to replace one bad drive without losing data. Low CPU overhead for software RAID.

Level 5 and 6 stripe your data across multiple disks (minimum 3 for R5, 4 for R6). This gives you the chance of replacing one (R5) or two bad (R6) drives without losing data. There's a noticable write speed hit, and a substantial CPU load during rebuilds. Low CPU load on a modern processor though. Rebuild times can be really long if you're on 4tb disks. ZFS has its own similar thing called RAIDZ, but it really is the same idea under the hood.

Level 0 is striping, and offers no redundancy. It was literally an afterthought, and should only be used if you're STARVED for iops, and have good, continuous, backups.

I use all the forms mentioned here, both at work and personally. It's got problems, but it's also the only game in town for reliably storing that much data locally.

>>60058286
Manually mirroring will still make into a raid type depending on the configuration as anon states above.

>>60058475
Forgot to add. Lookup the Backblaze quarterly reliability report. Choose drives that are shown to be reliable by the numbers.

I got a deal on a certain model of 2TB WD greens a while back, and they're horrible. Literally in 5 years, out of 10 drives, 3 are left working. Had I read the report first, I wouldn't have bought them.

>>60058475
Thanks for the response.

I was actually thinking of setting up a raid 10 with 4 2tb drives with the motherboard raid controller. The thing I'm worried about is how I could mess it up. For instance, If one the drives fails, would it be just as simple as just plugging in a new one and the raid automatically would start recovering?

Also, if I were to change motherboards, or mine just broke, what happens with the Raid? can I just get the data from the drives connecting them to another MB?

>>60058286
- Raid is TOTALLY worth it. It really is.
- Remember that Raid is not backup

Yes, the cost is higher. I store big files on a 6 drive RAID6 array. That's 2 3TB harddrives that are "wasted" on parity data. To me it's totally worth having 6TB less storage and the knowledge that if one or two drives fail then I'm fine.

I also do RAID1 on SSDs with --write-mostly on the spinning drive (writes to both, but reads from the SSD). If the SSD fails then I'm fine.

I've had numerous harddrives fail over the years. They get old and they just fail - depending on how long you use them. RAID will help you with that.

Now, there is one thing to think about when it comes to RAID, and this is kind of important. The number one cause of harddrive failure is actually rapidly shifting temperatures. If you have a RAID6 box and it's 20C inside and it's the middle of the winter and -20C outside and you open all your windows and leave them open for half an hour then that may be enough to kill several of your harddrives at once. Having a off-site backup of the most important things is essential even if you're using RAID.

>>60058560
TRUTH. WD Green 2TB and Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives should be avoided at all cost. I don't think they sell those WD Green 2TB failures anymore but they are doomed.

>>60058623
>motherboard raid controller
This is an interesting question, if someone knows how this works today then do share.

What I can tell you is that there is no such thing as a motherboard raid controller. That is really just a form of *software* RAID built into the BIOS. It's not like dedicated hardware RAID controllers (which I personally think is a bad idea).

If you're using GNU/Linux then mdadm is the obvious choice. The reason is that with mdadm you just need any computer which can connect the number of drives you need to use your RAID array. I don't know much about this Windows thing but generally you would want something either built into Windows or something that works on any Windows system.

I would like to know how motherboard raid works these days, if anyone knows then do share. I avoid it because I have the impression that if you make a RAID array with one motherboard then you can't just use that on any other motherboard but I haven't looked into this in years (since mdadm works fine).

>>60058754
Thanks for the explanation. Why do you think a Raid controller is a bad idea?

Winfag over here. I have the curiosity about Linux but I still haven't taken that step.

In that case I don't know if it suits my needs, since I'd like to change motherboards at some point. If I can't access the information when the motherboard is changed or damaged it kinda defeats the purpose. Or is there something I'm overlooking?

>>60058824
If a raid controller breaks, your data is pretty much gone as all the settings and information about the raid would be handled on said controller.

>>60058905
Makes sense. Cheers

>>60058824
>Why do you think a Raid controller is a bad idea?
You setup a RAID and all is well for 5 years and then you're RAID controller dies

and now you need the exact same proprietary RAID controller to get data off your array but that corporation who made it is bankrupt or don't make it anymore and now you're screwed.

And I _think_ this applies to motherboard BIOS software RAID too.

From the little bit of searching I did just now it seems that motherboard BIOSes have slightly different software implementations of their RAIDs which means they are usually not compatible between brands and even motherboards from the same brand. If there is some RAID built into Windows then use that?

>>60058905
Exactly. Well, almost. The settings/info are usually on the disk too but mostly only readable/understandable by the same controller.