Anyone here have experience with RAID

Originally Posted by Silound

I don't quite understand why you need a RAID to begin with.

If all you're doing is sharing large quantities of movies and music over P2P, then there's no reason to have such a complicated storage system. You can simply have 3 large independent drives for storage. if you lose any data, you specifically say that you can download it fairly quickly, so there's no reason to worry about data loss because you can replace it fairly quickly and efficiently.


I would suggest you buy a 10K RPM drive for your OS install and major programs, and use your three larger drives as basic inexpensive storage. Anything you REALLY need to back up, you can burn to a CD/DVD or move to an external smaller drive.

Your implying that all 900GB of my data reside somewhere else on the network which isn't true at all, most people pick and chose

I was drawn to RAID because of the big performance boost+the ability to keep a backup at all times

As far as games go, would it be best to install them to my RAID partition so that the game can access its files faster or would it be better to put them on my OS disk?

[jquirit]

Originally Posted by MrBucket101

I was drawn to RAID because of the big performance boost+the ability to keep a backup at all times

Please repeat to yourself...

"A RAID array is not a replacement for proper back-ups!"

When dealing with such a small array of drives, all it'll take is for two drives to go dead. And from experience, if you're buying all the drives at the same time, going to be running them all at the same time.. the likelihood of two drives starting to go bad at the same time (ie - one starts going bad, you scramble around to find a replacement to replacement, and in the interim, a second goes bad) is probable. When that happens, there goes your data. Seen it happen before, and I don't want you to share the same fate.

Personally, anything I want to keep I keep on DVD-ROM back-ups. Anything else on the array I can replace with a minimum of discomfort so it's no big loss to me if I lose a drive or two.

Good luck with your project!

[Silound]

Originally Posted by jquirit

Please repeat to yourself...

"A RAID array is not a replacement for proper back-ups!"

When dealing with such a small array of drives, all it'll take is for two drives to go dead. And from experience, if you're buying all the drives at the same time, going to be running them all at the same time.. the likelihood of two drives starting to go bad at the same time (ie - one starts going bad, you scramble around to find a replacement to replacement, and in the interim, a second goes bad) is probable. When that happens, there goes your data. Seen it happen before, and I don't want you to share the same fate.

Personally, anything I want to keep I keep on DVD-ROM back-ups. Anything else on the array I can replace with a minimum of discomfort so it's no big loss to me if I lose a drive or two.

Good luck with your project!

If you're that worried about drive failure, you should be backing up your data regardless. Arrays are NOT a backup, they're a supplement to larger backup methods.

Honestly, arrays are a novelty for the average user. And anything is downloadable on the net somewhere (and if it's truly not, just back it up)