Huge Hard Drives

[Jedakiah]

I need more room.  I currently have three 320 Barracudas in a soft RAID 5.  <--- Pathetic

Since my motherboard doesn't support real RAID 5 I was thinking it'd be best to stick with two large drives in RAID 1.  Do you agree? 

Comparison chart of fast, big hard drives along with on of my current ones.  The deskstar is the fastest, and most expensive.  I was thinking of spending $300-400 not $600.  But then I gots to thinking, that HD by itself is plenty of room for me.  What if I didn't have RAID at all?  Am I being stupid? 

[Fuzzeh_Panda]

Uh. When I think of RAID, think of redundancy and generally a loss of space. If you're that paranoid about losing data, then I suppose RAID is for you. But if you want space, then you might as well just go for a large drive. No, you probably won't be able to back it up, but you'll have more space. I suppose if you want performance, thought, you can always get a Raptor, or a 10,000 RPM drive to speed things up. Or one of those new fangled SATA 6's that I'm starting to hear about.

[Labyrinthine]

Uh. When I think of RAID, think of redundancy and generally a loss of space. If you're that paranoid about losing data, then I suppose RAID is for you. But if you want space, then you might as well just go for a large drive. No, you probably won't be able to back it up, but you'll have more space. I suppose if you want performance, thought, you can always get a Raptor, or a 10,000 RPM drive to speed things up. Or one of those new fangled SATA 6's that I'm starting to hear about.

In this case, RAID 1 would be the exact opposite. You get the true amount of space from both drives and they run really, really fast. Downside - if you crash just once, all your data is toast.

So, no, I do not agree that you should run two large drives in RAID 1, especially if it's data you need to keep. Either get a raid controller that can do 5 or stick with single large drives.

2x750 should be plenty. Unless you're working audio/video where you need a huge scratchdisk, then even that may be iffy.

[mikehale]

raid 0 = striped
raid 1 = mirror

and also, raid is NEVER a substitute for a good backup. just do a raid 0 array over 3 drives and have an external hard drive for backups or use Mozy

[Labyrinthine]

Durrr...

I r smrt

[Jedakiah]

It's not like I store clients files on my disks.  Pretty much just 400 gigs of downloads.  I would be in despair if I lost them, but it's not the end of the world. 

[b.ho]

It's not like I store clients files on my disks.  Pretty much just 400 gigs of downloads.  I would be in despair if I lost them, but it's not the end of the world. 

that's what you say now....

[Powdered!]

that's a shitload of p*rn you have there

[Jedakiah]

It's actually tons of TV.  I don't have cable or satellite...

[mikehale]

if you lost all that you could always get it back off tvrss.net or digital hive. have you tried hulu.com? it's out of beta now and open to everyone.

[logicaL!]

It's actually tons of bad TV and semi-legally acquired movies .  I don't have cable or satellite...

Fixed.

jk.

[Jedakiah]

It's true.

[Jedakiah]

I need more room.  I currently have three 320 Barracudas in a soft RAID 5.  <--- Pathetic

I found out that my motherboard does run real RAID 5, so that's a plus.  And it opened up my options towards running three cheaper drives at faster speeds. 

I'm curious what utility you guys would recommend for partitioning and copying hard drives.  I was thinking something bootable as I hate "extra" software. 

Also, have any of you ever transferred RAID arrays to totally different controllers?  In the near future I will probably be slipping over to the darkside and getting a q9300 with a P35 chipset.