Page 2 - Newbie RAID questions...

Thanks very much to Mr Explosion, Mr PS2 Man, and Pyro! This has been very helpful info I think I'm on the right track now. I'm liking the idea of RAID 5 more and more each day.

Thanks for all the links anyway, Pyro!

As suggested, I'll probably be aiming for about 4 or 5 500gb drives (I'll try to use as few drives as possible). If there's any possibility of expanding the array at all then I'm very interested. I don't care if it takes a week to update it (I've gone without my PC for longer) it would be worth it. It would mean I could get just 3 drives for now, and save a bit of money.

PS2man, I know what you mean about mixing old drives with new drives. It seems like mixing old and new batteries (ie bad) but actually I think it's a good idea. The big vulenrability of RAID 5 is losing 2 drives at once, so if all the drives are the same age there's a much higher chance!

I'm updating my whole system, so the motherboard isn't a problem. And I will get SATA drives, as suggested. I'm trying to build a silent system. I'm guessing this will probably be difficult, even impossible where RAID is concerned?

Mr Explosion, that coolermaster stacker looks very cool indeed. I'm still not sure whether to house them externally or not. I'll keep mulling it over! Noise could be a factor, because if I can't get a silent RAID array then I have yet another reason to keep them in a cupboard.

2 more questions...

1. What is SATA anyway and what's so good about it?

2. With RAID 5, how do you know when a drive has failed? (Obviously, finding out straight away is really, really important!)

Thanks again! I'm off for a couple of day so I may not reply till Sunday.

I don't know about the RAID question, but I wanna know too.

SATA, short for Serial ATA, is faster than PATA, short for Parallel ATA, also known as IDE. Basically, it's faster. the read/write times are faster in SATA drives, the downside is you can only have one drive per SATA port.

however, ther eis another upside to sata. no more 80 wire super long and ugly air obstructing wires (unless you get roundies that are colored/braided), its all in a very VERY thin 7 wire connector.

forgot about that one - very true. First time I saw a SATA cable, I did not believe that it was actually that thin.

Well, the best I can do is say that PATA is a parallel bus and SATA is a serial bus, obviously. We started out with serial buses and then moved onto parallel versions of those buses, or many of them at once, which of course brought up speeds. That would be a standard parallel port. Now why is it that our parallel busses are being beaten out by single buses? Because of one main reason: cross-talk. We can get data across a single line much, much more efficiently than we can over a slew of buses at the same time. Basically, it's easier to control. Take a highway for example. If you have five lanes of traffic flowing, all which are full up on cars all switching lanes and making people drop their speed so that they can merge, all five lanes go slowly. You have five lanes of traffic going through, but they move slowly. Now if you can get a single lane highway to move six or seven times faster than the cars on the five lane highway then you have a greater number of cars going by each hour. Now I may be totally wrong about all this, but I think I'm right :-D

well, in your analogy....if you have 5 lanes going at speed "x", and one lane going at speed "5x", then you'd have the same amount of cars, but it'd be easier to control. It is my understanding that with the slower, older processors, parallel helped them do more in less clock pulses, and now that we've got boxes that are very fast, going back to serial gives us more control given the new faster speed that we can do serial at. Of course, this is digressing from what gameshow host wanted ... and as always, this is just info in my head - I could be wrong.

Your controller will tell you when a drive has failed in your array.

Excellent info here. I nominate this for a sticky mods and admins! haha

Anyway. RAID is primarily for file servers. RAID 5 is probably the best implementation, and should protect against data loss, but for home use I'd prefer to run a RAID 0+1 As it will mirror a striped array. This will yeild speed and direct redundancy. It may be a bit more expensive, but faster. Really, you don't need RAID to ensure data safety for how often you'll use your computer. File servers work their drives like crazy, especially in professional implementations. This increases their risk for failure, and thus numerous modes of redundancy are required. For a home user, (for example) that uses a seagate drive is guarunteed a 5year warranty. This means the manufacturer is confident it won't fail within 5 years. At your rate of data consumption, I don't think a 5 yo drive is going to satisfy you any longer. Just get individual drives, and don't spend the extra for a parity drive. Just my 2 cents.

SATA DEFINITION

RAID 0+1 will be monumentally more expensive seeing that he's looking for 2TB of space.