Going Raid

[koryusai]

Hi guys i have just looked at the smart stats for my main storage/large program drive and im getting a caution via CrystalDisk:

C5 Current Pending Sector Count

so better safe than sorry im going to replace the drive with a raid config.

I have a second storage drive also that is fairly new and dose not get used as much

The power on hours of the failing drive is around 21635 about 2.4 years so i have had a fair amount of use out of it.

so anyway i would like to know what you recommend raid 1 or raid 10 also what drive's
and would i need a raid controller

This drive is the WDC WD2003FYYS-02W0B0 thats failing



Thanks in advanced
Koryusai Kun

 

[YouWhat]

First `how many drives are you going to use?
Second, whats your motherboard (might have raid controller built in)
Thirdly how critical is the data?

For things that are important you don't want to loose, I would look to either Raid 5 or 6 (Mirror + Spanning or Mirror + Stripe, according to some RAID controllers), if the data isn't important then would look to RAID 0 striped as this will give a performance increase.

RAID 0 needs minimum of 2 disks, RAID 5 needs a minimum of 3

 

[tinytomlogan]

If the drive is failing just move all of the data to the unused drive

 

[koryusai]

First `how many drives are you going to use?
Second, whats your motherboard (might have raid controller built in)
Thirdly how critical is the data?

For things that are important you don't want to loose, I would look to either Raid 5 or 6 (Mirror + Spanning or Mirror + Stripe, according to some RAID controllers), if the data isn't important then would look to RAID 0 striped as this will give a performance increase.

RAID 0 needs minimum of 2 disks, RAID 5 needs a minimum of 3

My Motherboard is the ASRock extreme9 x79 as for the drives i could proberly get 3 of them.

If the drive is failing just move all of the data to the unused drive

i have done for the time being i just would like a bit more redundancy



i have been looking at some drives and the western digital Surveillance series of drives looks quite good for 24/7 365 use

anyway thanks so far

 

[tinytomlogan]

WD Red's are built for raid - but if youre serious about it youll need a raid card otherwise your write speeds will be terrible

 

[YouWhat]

Your motherboard has RAID built into it, so you just need to enable that in it, and setup RAID 5 (Stripe + Mirror would be best choice if you have one).

You MIGHT have to select what sata headers / ports on motherboard you want to use the RAID on (I have this on another motherboard to what I am using on this), but once you have set them up in BIOS and RAID controller, you will just need to partition it up and format it as normal in Windows disk manager.

I personally would look to either WD Reds, WD Greens (depending on how much the drive is used, Reds if alot) or possibly Seagate Barracuda, but I have never tried or heard anything on the WD Purples (Surveillance drives), but the Seagate drive (linked above) has the same performance as it, and is cheaper (only looked at 2TB drives as example), but you could use that extra £££$$$€€€ towards possibly a forth or fifth drive to increase you storage.

Hope this helps you.

***EDIT***

As Tom said above, you might want to look into a RAID card (Will need to do this before setting up ARRAY as it might not import it into a different RAID chip system).

It will really depend on your use of it whether or not to hit up the expense of a RAID card. For basic home servers and backups, file sharing, streaming etc, you should only need the onboard RAID, but if it used for on the fly video encoding, Photoshop editing where pictures etc are stored on server, then you will need the extra speed the dedicated card can provide.

 

[koryusai]

Thanks guys what raid controller would you recommend and im seeing wd red drives and wd red pro drives im looking for speed and reliability as best you can

which one should i get in terms of the drive