Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, mac_h8r1, Nemesis
Scrotos wrote:The objective is just to make it look like one drive to the OS? Do you want any fault tolerance, i.e. last through a drive dying?
Scrotos wrote:This might be worth a shot, depending on your needs: http://www.drivebender.com/
Review with kind of a walkthrough on the capabilities. Should be better now, a year or more later:
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2011/11 ... 11-part-1/
I actually have this in anticipation of building a storage server for the home but haven't gotten around to building the rest of it yet so I haven't used it myself.
absurdity wrote:I wouldn't recommend RAID 5 unless you plan on throwing down for a good RAID card as well. My experience with it on consumer hardware is that it performs very poorly.
nanoflower wrote:Drive Bender sounds like it is just a simple way to present a number of drives as though they were one. It does provide some extra features like data deduplication but I see no mention of RAID or how it handles a crashed drive. I would be looking at something like ZFS or the new features of Windows Server instead of Drive Bender (and you still need a RAID solution that is either hardware or software based (Windows can provide this.)
mattshwink wrote:Good RAID cards will set you back a few hundred dollars (or more).
If you use an embedded chip for RAID you could be SoL if the motherboard goes (and you can't get a replacement). With a PCIe card you can move to another machine or buy another card if the card goes bad. If the controller employs caching (and the good ones do) and there is no battery backup then you could lose data with a sudden power loss.
LSI, Highpoint, and Adaptec are three of the major RAID card players (there are others). Feel free to look around for cards. You don't need anything too fancy. Keep in mind, though, that most these days are PCIe x8. You might not have a free slot that can handle that. There are some PCIe x4 ones out there (but again, you might not have a free slot that is capable).
With all that said, your motherboard supports RAID-5. I did a quick google search and no one is reporting problems, though I would check for yourself. RAID-5 will give you ~3TB of usable space and it should perform better then the single drives too.
One of the biggest problems with RAID-5 (and RAID-6) is rebuild. If you lose a drive in the array, it will still be online, but in a degraded state. Arrays in the state (and when they are rebuilding) take about a 50% performance hit.
Lastly, RAID is no substitute for backups. If the data is important to you, back it up!
RAID10
|
RAID0-------------------RAID0
| |
RAID1-----------RAID1 RAID1-----------RAID1
Jon wrote:If I were you I would go with RAID10, this gives you the best of both worlds. Performance and redundancy. RAID10 is faster than RAID5 because there's no need to calculate parity.
Quick illustration here:
RAID10
|
RAID0-------------------RAID0
| |
RAID1-----------RAID1 RAID1-----------RAID1
Meaning you have 4 drives in total. 2x RAID1 arrays and then those RAID1 arrays are in a RAID0 array.
StuG wrote:Edit: Lastly, would software RAID without a controller be acceptable given my hardware?
absurdity wrote:I wouldn't recommend RAID 5 unless you plan on throwing down for a good RAID card as well. My experience with it on consumer hardware is that it performs very poorly.
mattshwink wrote:One of the biggest problems with RAID-5 (and RAID-6) is rebuild. If you lose a drive in the array, it will still be online, but in a degraded state. Arrays in the state (and when they are rebuilding) take about a 50% performance hit.
StuG wrote:Thanks! I have been doing some research of my own and I've been looking at the following combination:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816103223
StuG wrote:
StuG wrote:It seems like RAID 10 is really focused on getting performance out of the RAID solution, correct? I am not so worried about that, and while it does seem like a small cost I'm not totally sure it would be worth it in my situation.
Ryu Connor wrote:Using RAID 0, 1, or 5 from Windows (instead of from Chipset) or even the Windows 8 storage spaces would allow the array to be portable regardless of chipset.
RAID5 in Windows requires Server to setup, but will work under 7 or 8 if ported/carried over.
StuG wrote:nanoflower wrote:Drive Bender sounds like it is just a simple way to present a number of drives as though they were one. It does provide some extra features like data deduplication but I see no mention of RAID or how it handles a crashed drive. I would be looking at something like ZFS or the new features of Windows Server instead of Drive Bender (and you still need a RAID solution that is either hardware or software based (Windows can provide this.)
Sadly redundancy is the most important feature for me. I don't care too much about making them all appear as the same drive, I just want the security that my data isn't gone after a drive dies.