Storage Solutions RAID advice required

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Based upon my personal experience:-
I have been using Raid 1 on my desktop for the last 4 years on the same set of Hitachi 1 TB drives.
Never faced any problem.
Works like a charm.
I have been using Hitachi drives in the past as well and i am pretty satisfied with them
I am using the on board raid card which gives me the option to have a Raid 1 with a Spare drive option as well.
So in case 1 drive fails the data will immediately start getting copied on the spare drive
Raid 1 has only 1 drawback that the reads are slow but frankly you wont notice them.
I would say go with Hitachi drives ( 2 x 1TB for raid and if possible buy 1 more 1TB and attach it as spare) + Raid 1.All of them will be internal so space is also not a constraint
Best part of Raid 1 is that you have at least 1 complete copy of the data with you at all times .
Raid 5 is only recommended where speed is the main concern which in your case is not.
 
Arv90 said:
I think you can make a hot spare as there is an option of Hot-plugging as per your Mobo Manual

I would say try installing an OS after configuring a RAID and try plugging out an HDD from it and check whether the system works
This is purely on experimental basis.Please do not blame me later
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hot plugging is not same as hotspare... your experiment will definitely fail.

when one of the disks fail in a raid, the system will rebuild the raid using the hotspare and then flag the faulty drive. after that point, you will be able to replace the faulty drive. its not like you pull out a drive at random and then the system handles it.
 
booo said:
hot plugging is not same as hotspare... your experiment will definitely fail.

when one of the disks fail in a raid, the system will rebuild the raid using the hotspare and then flag the faulty drive. after that point, you will be able to replace the faulty drive. its not like you pull out a drive at random and then the system handles it.
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Thanks for pointing out. I messed up both terms hot spare and hot plugging.
Hot swapping
Hot swapping and hot plugging are terms used to describe the functions of replacing computer system components without shutting down the system. More specifically, hot swapping describes replacing components without significant interruption to the system, while hot plugging describes the addition of components that would expand the system without significant interruption to the operation of the system.[1] Once the appropriate software is installed on the computer, a user can plug and unplug the component without rebooting. A well-known example of this functionality is the Universal Serial Bus (USB) that allows users to add or remove peripheral components such as a mouse, keyboard, or printer.
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Wondering why will the experiment fail.
What i had in my mind is to check reliability after the RAID is configured, not the hot spare

dilpreet said:
Raid 1 has only 1 drawback that the reads are slow but frankly you wont notice them.
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I think you got it the other way.
Write speeds are low on RAID 1.By obvious logic, the RAID controller has to write twice in RAID 1 for mirroring of data.
Read speed will be better as the RAID controller is able to fetch data from either of the mirrored disks.
 
Arv90 said:
I think you got it the other way.
Write speeds are low on RAID 1.By obvious logic, the RAID controller has to write twice in RAID 1 for mirroring of data.
Read speed will be better as the RAID controller is able to fetch data from either of the mirrored disks.
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there are no read or write overheads for raid1. raid 1 has two spindles and twice the writes/reads.

on the other hand, raid5 has write penalties but reads are faster due to striping. raid 10 has no write penalties as it doesnt have to calculate any checksums. but with raid 10 you will get less storage.
 
booo said:
there are no read or write overheads for raid1. raid 1 has two spindles and twice the writes/reads.
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Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_1
the write performance remains at the level of a single disk.
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which implies that write speed factor comes down to individual disk.
The RAID controller has to split the bandwidth for writing twice.
This is in THEORETICAL TERMS only.
In practical , the read/write performance difference is hardly noticeable.

booo said:
but with raid 10 you will get less storage
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and will require a minimum of 4 Nos. of HDD's
 
booo said:
raid controller sits on pci bus, which has many times more faster than the hdds.
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Sorry.My bad!
Will change the grammer
Bandwidth to the RAID controller has to be split.
As I said earlier, its all in theory.
In practical, the difference is hardly visible.
 
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