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Help Building a RAID Array

MyiagrosMyiagros Registered User regular
I've been looking into raid today so that I can get some sort of redundancy for my 500GB+ files on my desktop. From what I read RAID 10(01) is the best for home setups so that you get the speed increase of 0 and the redundancy of 1. Now some websites I've seen have said that in order to set up RAID 10 you need at least 4 hard drives and most don't say anything on the subject,
What I'm wondering is if it is possible to take the 2 500GB hard drives I currently have and set them up into RAID10. I've checked my motherboard specs and raid is supported and I'm running Vista.

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Posts

  • psychotixpsychotix __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2009
    Myiagros wrote: »
    I've been looking into raid today so that I can get some sort of redundancy for my 500GB+ files on my desktop. From what I read RAID 10(01) is the best for home setups so that you get the speed increase of 0 and the redundancy of 1. Now some websites I've seen have said that in order to set up RAID 10 you need at least 4 hard drives and most don't say anything on the subject,
    What I'm wondering is if it is possible to take the 2 500GB hard drives I currently have and set them up into RAID10. I've checked my motherboard specs and raid is supported and I'm running Vista.

    No it is not.

    With two drives you can only do 1 and 0. For home configurations the best is RAID 5. You only need three drives and you get speed + redundancy.

    Also FYI, if you are going to do raid you're going to have to back up all those files first. Reinstall the OS, and then move everything back onto them.

    psychotix on
  • TincheTinche No dog food for Victor tonight. Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    If you're gonna be using your motherboards raid controller, that just introduces an additional point of failure.

    Why bother with a RAID setup on a desktop machine anyway? Raid is not backup.

    Tinche on
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  • psychotixpsychotix __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2009
    Tinche wrote: »
    If you're gonna be using your motherboards raid controller, that just introduces an additional point of failure.

    Why bother with a RAID setup on a desktop machine anyway? Raid is not backup.

    Raid is redundency, it can help save data.

    And using anything introduces another point of failure. I don't use mobo raid (dedicated controller FTW) but intel based raid isn't that bad on a desktop.

    psychotix on
  • VoodooVVoodooV Registered User regular
    edited September 2009
    The benefit of RAID is in the acronym: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

    I have a RAID 5 array of 4 x 320 GB drives = just under 1TB. The 4 smaller disks together cost much less than a 1TB drive at the time. In addition, you gain the redundancy. But as was stated earlier: RAID is not backup.

    RAID 5 is supposed to give you a access time boost too due to the striping, but it's my understanding that your standard consumer motherboard onboard RAID is not going to give you any significant speed boost. Dedicated server RAID cards will, but they is not cheap.

    VoodooV on
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