To RAID or not to RAID

That is the question.

What do you guys think?

As you know I am building this new PC here but am not sure if I should RAID the SATA drives or not. My MB supports hardware RAID 0,1, 0+1,10 and 5. It also supports JBOD (useless). I can also RAID across the SATA and/or IDE drives so can have 8 total drives internal. Lots to choose from.

I even have a cool internal removable SATA rack the takes up 2 drive bays but allows easy access changeability to 3 disks.

I was always of the mind set of RAID at home not really worth it. Servers sure, but at home it never seemed worth it since you can simply GHOST your drives.

Since I am starting fresh here I am thinking about it again.

RAID 0 is lame so that’s out.

RAID 1 of course would give me that mirror image but if the registry gets corrupted, a virus goes crazy or just something weird in the OS that does not get my system back. I will still have to create a ghost images anyway to restore to an earlier time from. RAID 1 is still good though if one HD dies but then again I can restore from a ghost image. It maybe a few days behind but that would not be that bad.

My real concern is performance during games etc.. will a RAID 1 slow me down at all?
It has to double write everything. Since it is not writing to the disk much during gaming I would think not but then again it would still be writing to the swap file data etc..

RAID 0+1 is also out since it is not really that good.

RAID 5 I was thinking across 3 disks. Better performance and pseudo mirroring or redundancy in that the data can be recovered from the parity sets to rebuild the faulty/failed HD.

RAID 10 is good but that would require 4 HD’s. Unsure that is worth it.

Maybe I should just set up two SATA drives and ghost the main one to the other 2 or 3 times a week as I do now.

Opinions? Anyone here RAID there system drives? If so which level and any other data you may have for me. Performance etc…

I had Raid 1 on my SATA's. One of my drives had a problem. It slowed down my whole system However, I just turned it off and kept running off of the other drive. It did save my butt. Now I am only running 1 drive because I can't get a replacement for the bad one.

Also, I run my OS on a seperate drive and install everything to the SATA setup. That way, I can wipe windows and not have to reinstall everything again. Some programs require you to reinstall for registry settings, but others do not. It also helps me remember what programs I have installed.

Oh man what software do you use? 😉

Very few programs these days do NOT require a re-install. Most all have set up programs and registry settings etc... Annoying at times 😉

Wiping windows like that is just annoying. You cannot even play a game without a re-install these days. One thing I hate about this new system is the re-install of a ton of crap.

I am going to use a program called PC relocator though, that should help with a chunk of programs. I used it before and it is not bad all in all.

Thanks for the input though... maybe a RAID 1 would be cool to try at first. I can always turn it off. This was my original thinking.

I am also thinking that this time I will just install the OS and programs on the same 250 GB drive mirrored. Having a 250 GB mirrored drive just for the OS and adding another for games etc.. just seems silly to me.

WinRar and WinAmp come to mind.

There are others I use that don't require a reinstall. Also, I have a lot of data stuff from my web work. I like the fact it is available no matter what I do with the OS.

Paladin wrote:Oh man what software do you use? 😉

Very few programs these days do NOT require a re-install. Most all have set up programs and registry settings etc... Annoying at times 😉

No software on a Mac requires reinstall.

“IS” brother.

Can you take the entire Adobe suite and simply copy the directory of files and copy it to another machine with no other procedure? Just running the .exe file will run it fine? Since OS X on the Mac is Unix based so the user profiles, or environment, is what may save it.. I agree this is a good thing but it is not prefect though.

PC's require registry settings of course so this is mainly what prevents the files from simply running out of a directory. They did this mainly for a central depository of settings but I think another reason is to prevent piracy or at least make it harder. I cannot blame them since PC’s are %90+ of the market. Some software does not require this so will run when copied. All software could run this way, they choose not to.

Having the registry is not all bad. There are things you can do with the PC, especially security and profile wise on corporate computers that you can not do on the MAC like pushed group profiles and policies..

Anyway…IS 😉

IS man, I am not expressing an attitude that MAC is better. All OS's have their downfalls.

MacWhore!