I need to pick the brains of some of the card carrying smart guys around here.
I am looking to set up a Raid system on my main PC.
I have never set up any Raid before so please bear with me if some of my questions are simple.

Specifically, I want to set up a Raid 5.
My motherboard is an Asus m3a78-em. According to the manual, it only has raid 0,1 and 10 chipset for Raid built in.
I am taking this to mean that if I go with Raid 5, it will have to be a software Raid.

I have done some reading and at the moment, I understand that with Raid, the disc should all be the same size and speed. If not, the extra space and speed will be lost.

My questions are these…
Where can I find the software to run a Raid 5? Which is the best and most user friendly?

It is my desire to add disk later on to grow the storage capacity as the need for more space comes up.
Is this as simple as just adding a new disk to the Raid 5 setup? Can I add this disk without destroying the data that I already have on this Raid 5? I am concerned about this because I will not have enough disk laying around to simply offload all my data to build a new and larger Raid 5.

Lastly..how feasible is it to set up 2 Raids on a single PC?

Thanks

4/15/2010 1:39:30 PM

why are you setting up raid on a desktop?

4/15/2010 1:41:32 PM

^^ listen to ^ he knows his shit.

4/15/2010 1:50:51 PM

It is my desktop..but is also operates as the storage server for my network.
I am streaming across the internet to 3 different TV's with the Playon media server software on this PC.
I am also playing Movie and TV files to those TV's that I keep stored on this PC across my lan..
My biggest concern is losing data to an eventual Hard Drive failure.
I am also wanting to consolodate 4 TV HD's and 4 Movie HD's into one large drive so I do not have to remember which drive I put what movie on..etc....

[Edited on April 15, 2010 at 1:55 PM. Reason : .]

4/15/2010 1:53:50 PM

Don't put RAID on your desktop!

Buy two 2TB drives and mirror everything from one to the other. If one of them fails within the 3 year warranty, get it replaced. Do this again in 3 years with the new 10TB drives that we'll have

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache
$139.99 with Free Shipping
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514

4/15/2010 2:06:42 PM

tbh in that situation windows home server on a low power machine w/ lots of disk is probably the best way to go.

Without a controller that does raid 5 you could setup software raid in windows. I've never done software raid, but i think the basic process is, convert your disks to dynamic, go through a wizard. It should be expandable, but remember that expansion is potentially risky so make sure you dont lose power or anything while its going on.

If would really highly recommend WHS cause it takes all that stuff over for you and you just cram it full of disks and more space magically appears. It also lets you turn your main computer off/put it to sleep without losing access to those files over the network. You can install whatever software you want on it, so you dont bog down your main pc. Although if you dont use your primary pc all that much then its probably not a big benefit.

4/15/2010 2:13:21 PM

Actually, my understanding of Raid 10 is that is what it does.

The reason that I decided against Raid 10 is that I would hate to have to buy 2 drives for one space each time I wanted to expand. Raid 5 allows for a little more use of the drive space.

And I am already looking at 9TB in what I currently have.
If I were to simply mirror disk, I would still have the growing problem of having to remember what file is in what folder.

One of the things I want here is to be able to go to one Movie file on the TV's...or one TV file.

4/15/2010 2:13:32 PM

Thanks Shaggy



[Edited on April 15, 2010 at 2:19 PM. Reason : .]

4/15/2010 2:14:28 PM

I'll second the Windows Home Server recommendation. The drive extender technology is awesome.

4/15/2010 2:24:54 PM

raid 10 is essentially raid 0 on top of raid 1. So you have 4 disks minimum, 2 disks mirror(RAID1) 1 half of the stripe(RAID0). The other two disks mirror(RAID1) the other half of the stripe. It performs very well and has good failure tolerence, but its very expensive space wise.

RAID5 offers less performance for writes but good read performance. You'd probably never notice it with your small workload, and would benefit much more from the increased available space.

WHS has some software raid of its own, an essentially adds whatever disk you connect to one big pool of disks which you can then partition as you see fit into logical drives. So you could have one big fat one for everything.

4/15/2010 2:25:17 PM

Quote :

"in that situation windows home server on a low power machine w/ lots of disk is probably the best way to go. "

4/15/2010 2:37:54 PM

I have software RAID5 running under Windows XP. It works pretty well and read speeds are fine, but things like decompressing files takes forever. The increased space and fault tolerance is nice, considering how cheap hard drives are these days and how limiting RAID5 is when it comes to expanding, I'm not sure it's really worth it.

I've heard a lot of good things about WHS, but it's my understanding that you need to be careful when using it with WD EARS drives (though I've heard EADS drives are fine). Knowing what I know now, when I finally break my array, I'll probably move everything into a RAID1 or WHS setup.

4/15/2010 2:38:24 PM

I agree on all points about using WHS with a bunch of drives.

4/15/2010 2:53:27 PM

I have been looking at this WHS option. I had not considered it but based on the advice, I am looking at it now.

One thing had me a little concerned and I thought that I would ask about it here.

According to what I am reading about WHS, you install software on all the PC's that will be accessing the server.
My concern is that I am not going to be able to install any software either in the 2 WDTV lives that I have set up or the LG LH50 TV that has networking built in.

Does anybody know if this equipment will be able to access the files on the server? Keep in mind that the ability for the TV's to access and play movies/TV this way is the primary reason for setting this up.

Thanks again

4/30/2010 3:05:02 PM

Quote :

"Don't put RAID on your desktop! Buy two 2TB drives and mirror everything from one to the other."

and how is he going to mirror it without RAID?


Look, if you are going to do raid, do it in hardware. Buy an add-on card on newegg. In general, software RAID is a bad idea, because if you can't boot into the OS, you are fucked and lose everything. That's why you REALLY don't want to go the way of dynamic disks in Windows. Unless they've changed it since the last time I dicked with it, it's just data-loss looking for a place to happen.

Quote :

"The reason that I decided against Raid 10 is that I would hate to have to buy 2 drives for one space each time I wanted to expand. Raid 5 allows for a little more use of the drive space."

That is a negative of 10, but RAID-5 can actually end up with a shorter time to failure than a single disk if you put too many disks into it. RAID-5 with a lot of disks just simply isn't a good idea.

4/30/2010 5:09:59 PM

Quote :

"Look, if you are going to do raid, do it in hardware. Buy an add-on card on newegg. In general, software RAID is a bad idea, because if you can't boot into the OS, you are fucked and lose everything. That's why you REALLY don't want to go the way of dynamic disks in Windows. Unless they've changed it since the last time I dicked with it, it's just data-loss looking for a place to happen."

My software RAID5 install under Windows XP has survived at least 3 different installs of Windows.

Not saying it's a good thing to do, but OS dying definitely doesn't make your data disappear.

4/30/2010 5:30:20 PM

http://www.openfiler.com/ ?

4/30/2010 9:59:21 PM