RAID - any advice...

[Mustang]

* Now posted in corect forum!! * I will do a search on the web but any thoughts on what level of RAID to go for if I want a decent file storage device? Are there increased levels of "safety" or do you select the type of RAID according to your needs?

[KevinS]

IMO, RAID 5 is the cheapest and suitable for most (except databases).. RAID 10 (or 1+0 if you like) is my preference - striped for performance and mirrored for redundancy, but costs more as you need a minimum of 4 disks, whereas RAID 5 will work fine with 3..

[b0redom]

What are you after?

Cheap?
Resiliant?
Fast?

Pick 2....

[Mustang]

What are you after?

Cheap?
Resiliant?
Fast?

Pick 2....

Resilliant is highest priority. The other 2 would be opposite ends of the spectrum - cheap is always a bonus but not at the expense of anything else so I would say fast is marginally higher....

[Ardesco]

3ware raid card. Best is raid 6 so that if one drive fails, and then another fails during the rebuild there won't be any data loss. Raid 5 is the norm, at least raid 1.

[Sockpuppet]

3ware raid card. Best is raid 6 so that if one drive fails, and then another fails during the rebuild there won't be any data loss. Raid 5 is the norm, at least raid 1.

Got a 3ware 9500S-12 in MyCos server. Ebay special @ £80 a few years ago.

Laptop syncs over the network each tmie I can be arsed (most nights) and the server then syncs to an external HDD every week at midnight.

[DiscoStu]

Got a 3ware 9500S-12 in MyCos server. Ebay special @ £80 a few years ago.

Laptop syncs over the network each tmie I can be arsed (most nights) and the server then syncs to an external HDD every week at midnight.

I think that deserves some Xeno geek points

[Ardesco]

I think that deserves some Xeno geek points

Why? Is that not the norm?

[gadgetman]

The main thing to note is that different RAID levels offer two different main features; performance and data protection.

The various RAID levels offer one or the other or a combination of the two.

Here's a beginners guide:

http://www.storagewiki.com/ow.asp?RAID

Personally in my home 'server' I have the OS running on two drives in RAID 0 array (for performance) and my data is stored on an array of 4 x 500MB drives in a 2TB RAID 5 array (I'm thinking of upgrading to 4 x 1TB).

This gives data security such that if any one of the drives go down you can hot swap a replacement and no data will be lost. This has actually happened to me, twice.

Oh and for the levels which offer protection (via parity), this is at a cost of a percentage of the total storage capacity. For RAID 5 you lose 25%.

You can use a dedicated RAID controller card or use the facilities built in to many motherboards.

[DiscoStu]

Why? Is that not the norm?

In my own case it's plug external drive into laptop and run backup at haphazard intervals and hope nothing bad happens