640g WD CB vs 74g Raptor for os drive

[n-sanity]

Hiya folks,

This has been asked before in a slightly different format, but to specifically ask:

If a $75 budget is considered, would one get a used 74gb raptor or a used 640g wd caviar black as the main os drive?

I currently have 2 cb 1tb's for storage and have a question - how good an idea is it to raid 0 them over mirror raiding? I'm only interested in storing my 120gb collection of music and roughly 1tb of movies, but am very afraid of losing everything if one drive fails. Has happened to me before on a 4x250 raid 0 setup, made entirely of identical wd caviars ! If any one is curious, they all failed within 3 months of the first one. There was plenty of power and plenty of cooling. Controlled by a stock gigabyte on-mobo raid controller.

I suppose the meat and potatoes of my question: How long can i safely expect my raid0 array to last in good health, provided ample ventilation and ample power is provided ???

Any health would be appreciated!

[krazyups]

Well, if you mirror raid them, then you will only end up with 1tb of total storage, so with your current setup, that is not really possible. If you could up your budget a little and get another 1tb hard drive, you could raid5 them, which would give you 2tb in total storage, and also the data security of a mirrored array.

It's hard to say how long a raid 0 array would be stable for, MTBF is 150,000 hours (?) on those hard drives, so theoretically it should last for quite some time, but of course, that's the Mean time, so one of them could die sooner, or they could both last longer than the 150,000 hours. I know, this was a great answer to that part of the question.

-Steve

[bojangles]

Don't RAID 0 your storage. You don't need performance from storage, but perhaps more reliability is needed. If you really want security, RAID 1 the two. You get the storage of one drive, but at least if one fails, you still might have the other with everything still intact.

As for the Black vs. Raptor: the Raptor is EXTREMELY old. Get the Black. I still have a Raptor that I don't even use, and have found that the Black is definitely a lot faster.

[Full Speed]

I would get that 640gig WD and raid 1 your two TB drives. Put the movies/music that you really care about on the mirrored drive and for the rest of the stuff over a TB you could store on the 640 WD.

[JimboToronto]

Originally Posted by n-sanity

I'm only interested in storing my 120gb collection of music and roughly 1tb of movies, but am very afraid of losing everything if one drive fails

No form of RAID is an adequate replacement for backups. It only protects against failure of (usually) a single HDD. It does not protect against malware, fire, theft, accidental deletion or power spikes.

My suggestion would be to get an external enclosure for one of your 1TB HDDs, backup your data to it and keep it disconnected from your system except for backing up or restoring backups. For protection against fire, theft, etc, keep it offsite.

I personally prefer multiple offsite backups including sharing. Most people's personal files, photos, financial records, etc will fit on a cheap flashkey or SDHC card. Larger collections of audio and video files are less personal and can be shared with friends.

Luckily in this country, according to the Copyright Act of 1998, citizens can legally make copies of copyright material for their own use (not for profit) so if a dozen people make legal copies of your media collection, you have a dozen offsite backups.

Sometimes giving to others can benefit the donor as well.

[Realityshift]

640gb wd black out performs the 74gb Raptor as long as its one of the older ones, which I believe the 74gb version is.

Jimbo... theft can happen to your external, as can fire, as can power spikes if you leave it turned on, but on top of that a large amount of external hard drives can be more prone to enviromental disturbances like being stored to close to your speakers ect. Raid 1 would work great for those 2 1tb hard drives and then id go with a short stroked 640gb black for your os and games, install your os at the front of the drive then your games can go in the rear, thats how I have mine set up and its pleanty fast for the $80 I paid. If you set up your raid as mirror when one drive fails you will have a back up on the 2nd drive, that is exactly what raid 1 is for.

[JimboToronto]

Originally Posted by Realityshift

Jimbo... theft can happen to your external, as can fire, as can power spikes if you leave it turned on, but on top of that a large amount of external hard drives can be more prone to enviromental disturbances like being stored to close to your speakers ect. Raid 1 would work great for those 2 1tb hard drives and then id go with a short stroked 640gb black for your os and games, install your os at the front of the drive then your games can go in the rear, thats how I have mine set up and its pleanty fast for the $80 I paid. If you set up your raid as mirror when one drive fails you will have a back up on the 2nd drive, that is exactly what raid 1 is for.

>>>theft can happen to your external, as can fire<<<

Yes, but if it's offsite it's very unlikely to happen at both locations.

>>> power spikes if you leave it turned on<<<

Backup HDDs should only be connected during backups or restores.

>>>a large amount of external hard drives can be more prone to enviromental disturbances like being stored to close to your speakers ect<<<

Actually, I've found that I suffer fewer HDD failures in external enclosures. I attribute this to better cooling, independent power supplies and less vibration from case fans, CPU coolers, etc.

I have no internal HDDs in my main rig, just my SSD array. My SATA-0 is connected to my front-panel eSATA and set as first boot device so if I want to boot from a HDD, I just plug it in and it takes priority over my array. When I finally break down and buy a hardware RAID controller, I'll feed all six SATA ports on the ICH9R to eSATA ports so I can connect six HDDs simultaneously, while booting from my SSDs.

>>>If you set up your raid as mirror when one drive fails you will have a back up on the 2nd drive, that is exactly what raid 1 is for<<<

Yes, but it still only protects against HDD failure.

[Realityshift]

Meh honestly what you propose is far to much work, I might do it if it was very valuable data that I was keeping, like launch codes for a nuke or something like that, but when your dealing with movies and music I think the op would be perfectly fine running raid 1 within his PC and a virus program... or just watching what he downloads. Any computer user should be running their PC on a surge protector to protect from spikes, and well if your computer lights on fire I think your going to be much more worried about other items in your house then your downloaded movies. I personally have never lost data on any of my hard drives in the whole 18 years that ive owned computers, nor have I ever had a movie or picture fail to load because of a virus, that is exaclty why we run our OS on 1 drive or partition and store everything else somewhere else so when we do have a virus we can simply reformat it out without losing data.

Also come to think of it, fires and theft could happen where you leave the hard drive as well and not your house :p I personally have had issues with leaving hard drives without power for periods of time (externals corupting my files during periods of inactivity...).

Honestly its really just a matter of how complicated the OP wants to make it.

[n-sanity]

DAMNIT** Completely forgot folks - i also have a 1tb Hitachi deskstar (7k1000 or whatever it's called), also 32mb cache. I can raid 5 :D!

Another question - how large would the penalty to the speed on a raid5 array vs pure raid 0 (of just the 2 wd cb's) be, using a cheapo controller or even gigabyte's/intel's onboard?

Thanks!

**EDIT: Indeed, intel's ich10 or whatever the ga-x58 extreme employs is able to do raid-5 ! Question still stands.

**EDIT2: Eeeek. Just found out the onboard 'raid' solutions are still fake raid! Bios-based software until windows boots and os software takes over :( That means the write-holes are still present, so pull the plug once on your pc and there goes your whole raid array... Now looking for a cheapo backed up controller...

[JimboToronto]

>>>how large would the penalty to the speed on a raid5 array vs pure raid 0 (of just the 2 wd cb's) be, using a cheapo controller or even gigabyte's/intel's onboard?<<<

Fairly considerable without a real hardware RAID card. Software RAID does RAID-0 okay, RAID-5 not so good.