RAID

[KNC Designs]

I know sometime in the future I will be building a new pc and was wondering if anyone uses a RAID 10 setup? Any thoughts or suggestions would be great.Design Pro+,Illy and PS cs3 will be on this machine.

Thanks
Curtis

[levelbest]

Hey Curtis:

We run RAID 1 (mirrored) with two drives and then a linksys NAS (network storage) also running RAID 1 that we back up to as well. Raid 10 requires 4 drives I believe and combines the benefits of raid 0 (striping) performance and raid 1 (mirroring) redundancy.

I use raid 10 on my server that hosts the websites but think for a home based pc, it's probably overkill. You can run raid 0 or 1 on most motherboards now, but 10 would require a more expensive raid controller or higher end motherboard.

I guess it's all in how much money you want to spend.

The benefit I get with the NAS is that I backup all my PC's on the network here at home (I think I am up to 9 now) to it.

[KNC Designs]

Thanks John my research has just began I have not even looked into hardware or cost yet just getting some ideas together.With everything needing more and more ram I will probably be using a 64 bit system and who knows what else. I like the idea of the mirroring for the safety aspect of backing up but don't know if the striping will really affect the overall speed of the system very much. So more research to come and thanks again for your input.

Curtis

[levelbest]

Curtis:

I don't think Design Shop/OS is 64 bit ready

Honestly, I use mirroring alone and don't notice a performance knock (4 of the 9 PC's are mirrored). Especially if the processor is fast and you have enough RAM. These days, I'm recommending for Vista Systems - 2GB minimum and preferably 3-4GB. There is a big difference between 1GB and 2GB and even more when you hit 4GB especially with processor intensive applications.

[Steve F.]

Curtis,
Just wanted to dispel a misnomer that mirroring a hard drive obviates the need for backing up data. It is true it protects you from the failure of a disk drive and should (operative word) keep you running while you deal with the failed disk. However, should you have some software issue that corrupts the data being written to disk, that corrupted data is written to both disks. Without a backup copy you are toast.

In addition to fault tolerance, mirroring your drive can provide performance benefits provided your disk controller is designed that way. However, in some cases mirroring can slow down performance because the write to both disks must be completed before the application receives an okay to proceed.

If your concern/need is to have a high performance system with high fault tolerance, then mirroring is the way to go. I agree with John that RAID 1 is the more cost effective for the average person.

If you are concerned about protecting your data in the event of a total PC failure I'd keep backups as part of the solution.

Like John suggests, memory (RAM) is more critical especially for applications you listed and for PS (Photoshop) I would look into a higher end graphic adapter.

Just my two cents

Sorry for the long post.

Steve Fletcher

[levelbest]

Steve brings up good points - that's the reason we run a NAS and regular backups. Ideally, the backup device should do versioning - which means if the file changes, it also keeps a copy of the old file as well - possibly even a few revisions back.

[KNC Designs]

Hey thanks again for the info !!! this is exactly why I threw this idea out there.

Curtis

[Steve]

What are you attempting to do? Each version of RAID does different things and there are about 10 different versions of it plus you can combine 0+1 or other combinations. There is also software and hardware based RAID. Software RAID is built into Windows and free or hardware based RAID can be costly.
If your purpose is to have a copy of your data in case of a hard drive failure, you could go with RAID 1 (mirroring) which is easy to fix, break the RAID, replace the failed drive, and recreate the RAID. The only issue is both hard drives must be identical. Will you be able to find that same hard drive if it fails in 6 or 7 years? Probably not because the standard will be in Terabytes and not gigabytes!
Like I said each RAID has positives and negatives so each one has to be looked are carefully before implementing.
You could also take the cheap way out and buy an external storage unit for about $100 at BestBuy. Or even a DVD-Recordable to backup your data.
I'm sure I confused some people with this but it isn't easy explaining RAID in non-technical terms.

[levelbest]

To add something that Steve said, RAID drives themselves sctually do not have to be the same (talking the hardware). If you use a drive that is say 1GB and one that is 1.5 GB, your useable size will be only as big as your largest drive (so it's just a capacity waste issue. Now IDEALLY and for performance reasons, 2 matched drives are the way to go. However, a number of times in the past, I have had to use two mismatched drives because of the circumstance he mentioned, where they no longer make a drive that small.

Oh, and I personally would never recommend software based RAID over hardware based raid. Been there tried that. You will definately see a performance loss using software RAID and I've found it to be just plain unreliable. YMMV.

A decent, basic, add on SATA RAID card shouldn't run you much more than $100. Higher perfomace cards like those made by Promise Technologies should be in the $150-300 range.