Raid1
 

Hey Guys,

I just bought myself 2 400gb freecom 7200rpm drivers for use with AE, PP2, photoshop and Illustrator.

So my question is... how safe is it 2 run a raid 1 configuration. i read on wikipedia that there was a 1:500 chance of it dying and then the other one could fail as well. die is quite a strong word.

what are your experiences with Raid and any good bad points you can think of? links etc?

Thanks Guys

Liam

im pc also and XP
1gb ram
p4 2.8
ati graphics card x700

Do you mean RAID 0? RAID 1 would increase your reliability, not lower it. RAID 0 is striping across multiple disks and RAID 1 is mirroring between two disks.

I run RAID 0 here at home. Two disks in RAID 0 for the system and two disks in RAID 0 for the data. So far so good, knock on wood.

RAID 0 increases your chances of failure. It's a gamble but you do get performance benefits and I back up anything important so a failure isn't the end of the world anyhow.

Liam, look here:

http://www.acnc.com/04_00.html

Hey Charlie,

im not sure to be honest. what i intend to do is backup my work and by the looks of it and the way that i understand it Raid1 would be better.

so if i am running the 2 hdd and one fails to my knowledge i would still have the other one. is this correct?

also thanks for the link Harm. its given be a better understanding but im still confused.

Thanks :-)

been doing some more reading and what does this mean for Raid0

its the bottom one that i dont understand... im only in my bedroom

Thanks :-)

RAID:
Redundent
Array of
Independent (or Inexpensive)
Drives

Raid0 is not redundent, for example if I stored the sentance "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system." in a Raid0 it might look like this:

Now if drive 2 suddenly fails then the Raid becomes useless since all you have is "This a of emergency system."

Therefore in situations where loss of any data is unacceptable due to the lack of any way to backup or retrieve the data should it be lost...you would not use a Raid0. Things such as data servers at the bank would be a typical example of mission critical.

Keep in mind this is an overly simplified example. Hope this helps.

Randy

Liam,

Others may differ from my approach, but this is what I would do:

1. C drive, OS/programs: single drive, no Raid, just a slipstreamed DVD for backup/restore.
2. Media drive: Raid5 (4+ array) or in case of 8+ in Raid6.
3. Scratch/preview: 2 drives in Raid0
4. Page file/miscellaneous: single disk.

Thanks Randall thats helped a lot and im beginning to undersatnd raid. it seems so simply and im just clicking onto it.

Thanks for that Harm. so how many more drives would i need to buy? 3? also what is a "slipstreamed DVD for backup" is this an actaul hdd or a DVD recorder, burner?

Thanks for your time guys :-)

Well with Harm's setup you're looking at minimum of 7 disks. That's a nice setup but it sounds like more than you're working with.

Go with RAID 1(mirrored disks for redundancy) for the important data and RAID 0(striped disks for performance) for the scratch disks where the performance counts. Just make sure anything on the RAID 0 storage isn't an original just in case you have a failure.

What size of HDD's do you recomend for a Scratch/preview?

Kevin,

My earlier post was more of an ideal situation than a practical solution for Liam.
Let me rephrase my earlier answer to Liam:

1. C drive: WD Raptor 74 or 150 GB boot disk for OS/programs
2. D drive: media drive, start with a 300+ GB drive with the intention to grow to a Raid5 with at least 4 disks on a good raid controller (Areca).
3. E drive: scratch disk, start with a single disk and in time extend that to raid0 with 160+ GB capacity per disk. That will give you ample space.

However, if I were to build a system now, I would probably opt for 500 GB disks only. They are pretty cheap nowadays and give you the flexibility to configure your raid as you want without losing storage capacity. If you have good disks this does not make sense, since your existing disks can no longer be used effectively.

Hope this makes sense.

Harm,

I was just asking because I am looking into upgrading my current setup of 4 250GB Drives in Raid 10.(last night I lost another drive, third one in 1 1/2 years)

I was thinking of upgrading to almost exactly what you described in you last post.

Thanks!

Thanks
 

Thanks Guys. im still undecided in what i will do but thanks for the tips and help and now i just have make my decision.

Thanks :-)

Kevin,

This failure rate seems rather high. Have you checked the temperature of your drives and the efficiency of your fans. Possibly exchanging your stock fans with SilenX fans with a large capacity could improve your temperature household.