Setting up RAID

[Kaitlyn]

I'm very surprised that I do not yet have a RAID setup... I don't really have a backup of my pictures and it would take a long time to reload my other media!

I'm thinking I would just do a RAID 1 setup. Just a few questions:
- Can I have two different raid setups? (4 drives)
- Say they are 500gb drives, can I partition it into 2 drives, and still the entire disk will be in RAID?
- Do the drives have to be identical - both in size, manufacturer, model #?
- Should I just use onboard RAID, buy a RAID controller, or get one of those external NAS w/ RAID?
- Any other information to help me decide/get started? :)

Thanks guys

[Emancipated]

Easiest solution would be to buy a Raid out of the box setup. I think Western Digital's MyBook dual drive systems have come down in prices in this past year. I bought mine last year for $400 but their 500GBx2 system is around $250 last time I checked. You can upgrade the drives to 1TB with no issue and that's mroe than enough to hold your pictures/media.

[lagzor]

I'm not an expert but here goes,

-yes I believe you can have two different RAID arrays (or you can do RAID 10 in your case)

-yes, I think once you create the array, you can still further specify the partitions

-iirc, ideally they should be all the same, but do not have to be. Depending on the RAID setup you are trying to do, usually the drives will use as much space as the smallest one, and the remaining space cannot be used. So ideally, all the drives of the same size is the most important part.

-if you have an onboard controller use that. I think there are software controllers as well, but they are not as good as a physical controller. The NAS option is up to you tho.

-GL!

[Dailow]

If you plan on upgrading your motherboard any time in the near future, it may be better to stick to an external NAS solution. Otherwise, onboard RAID will work fine.

For RAID 1, I "think" (I could be wrong) that you can use different sized drives, but the array itself will only be as big as the smallest drive. You could use different drives from different manufacturers, but the best solution is to use drives of the same capacity and manufacturer.

How you plan to partition your drives is irrelevant to the RAID Array. Let's assume you have a 500 GB RAID 1 array - Windows will only "see" 500 GB of unallocated space through the disk manager. If you wish to split that into 2 drives that you can certainly do so, but according to Windows it all belongs to one "device" (which in actuality is your RAID 1 array).

Also, one thing to keep in mind if you decide to use an onboard RAID controller from an existing system - you may need to reinstall Windows if that's the case. I went through a process recently where I went from 3 normal drives to a RAID array. In order to do so, I had to enable RAID in my BIOS, but Windows would immediately boot to a blue screen. I ended up doing a repair install of Windows, but I also had to specify the RAID drivers to install as well. After that, everything was fine again, and Windows was more or less in its previous state before the RAID.

One last thing - keep in mind that if you have data on existing drives, you'll want to back it up before you convert them to a RAID array since they'll be wiped clean when the array is created.

[theguyz]

Could simplify things by just using a external drive as backup. And can get a 1 TB for around $150

[maritrunks]

I'm very surprised that I do not yet have a RAID setup... I don't really have a backup of my pictures and it would take a long time to reload my other media!

I'm thinking I would just do a RAID 1 setup. Just a few questions:
- Can I have two different raid setups? (4 drives)
- Say they are 500gb drives, can I partition it into 2 drives, and still the entire disk will be in RAID?
- Do the drives have to be identical - both in size, manufacturer, model #?
- Should I just use onboard RAID, buy a RAID controller, or get one of those external NAS w/ RAID?
- Any other information to help me decide/get started? :)

Thanks guys

I have RAID 0 Setup with 2 320GB Seagate SATA2 drives

Yes you can have 2 raid setups (2 drives in RAID 0, and 2 drives in RAID 1) or have all 4 drives in RAID 0+1 (2 Drives stripped, and the other 2 are mirrored)

Yes you can Partition as much as you want, RAID is just a group of drives put together

Drives don't really have to be identical but they SHOULD. If both drives have the same seek time, read time, write time, RPM, cache and size, they will perform the best. If 1 HD is lower cache or lower RPM, or even lower size, then the RAID can still be setup, but they will be setup to the lowest HD specs in the array. This type of setup is never recommended

You can use any RAID controller, either onBoard, or a PCI card, or external, they all do the same thing, but cost more.


You should also look at your budget, before doing RAID and also update your BIOS before doing raid too. Also when your setting up RAID, you'll have to have all HDD have to be clean and ready for stripping (or mirroring) or both and make sure you have the disk drivers for your RAID controller on a floppy disk, you're going to need it when installing windows

[willy]

Could simplify things by just using a external drive as backup. And can get a 1 TB for around $150
I agree !

[Kaitlyn]

If I got a NAS, how much slower would the access time be versus the drives actually being connected directly to the motherboard?

[Luckyinfil]

You won't be able to create RAID 1 without formatting your current hard disk first AFAIK.. if your motherboard supports E-Sata.. its much easier to get that and speeds will be same as having it connected directly to the mobo

[Whizard]

Performance always varies in computers and at this point its only speculation we rather not make

[Emancipated]

If I got a NAS, how much slower would the access time be versus the drives actually being connected directly to the motherboard?

Performance always varies in computers and at this point its only speculation we rather not make

Performance disparities are negligible for 90% of users. A NAS is actually pretty good if you have a Gigabit network but even 802.11n is "good enough" for the majority. I can stream 720p movies through my N network. When I need to mirror an entire harddisk to my NAS, I'll hook up the ethernet and it's comparable to FW800; not quite but better than USB2, AFAIK.

[Kaitlyn]

Performance disparities are negligible for 90% of users. A NAS is actually pretty good if you have a Gigabit network but even 802.11n is "good enough" for the majority. I can stream 720p movies through my N network. When I need to mirror an entire harddisk to my NAS, I'll hook up the ethernet and it's comparable to FW800; not quite but better than USB2, AFAIK.

Could I stream 1080p?

[Emancipated]

Could I stream 1080p?

Not in my experience. It's choppy at best. That's on wireless. Wired should be fine.